WHEN : 24th May – 7th July / Opening 31st May, 6:00pm
WHERE : Griffith University Art Gallery
In New York in the late 1970s a young Richard Prince, working in the tear sheet department at Time Life, began to manipulate images from advertising, reconfiguring them as his own and, in the process, creating some of the most contentious and iconic work of the twentieth century. Prince’s ‘re-photographs’ of Marlboro cigarette advertising without logos reclaim the iconic hero of the frontier – the American cowboy – from the clutches of commercial advertising. Some 30 years later Queensland artist Michael Zavros revists Prince’s Untitled (cowboy) series in his recent work.
Spanning over 15 years of the artist’s practice, this exhibition brings together the Prince/Zavros series of drawings and paintings, as well as paintings of interiors, earlier works of men’s fashion drawn from commercial advertising and ‘TV’ paintings. Through Zavros’s appropriated appropriation – photography via painting – the work of Richard Prince is re-presented to a contemporary audience, for whom, arguably, the original context of cigarette advertising is redundant. The Prince/Zavros series is quite simply, romantic, and reminds us of the power of a great image and the potency of a single idea.
Prince/Zavros 9 2012 (detail) | oil on board | 14.0 x 21.0 cm
