Gagosian is pleased to announce Folk Songs, a presentation of never-before-seen recent work by Richard Prince.
Simple handmade paintings, drawings, and collages dating from 2018 to 2023 and five sculptures dating from 2007 to 2025. No magic. No mystery. No magical mystery tours. Hobo smokestack buckteeth and scarred upper lips exhaling chimney clouds of Lucky Strikes drifting over broken-down houses sitting in fields of exaggerated flowers, thousand-yard stares, cardboard caskets, and Mt. Rushmore weeds.
No digital drips. No immersive wallpaper. And no award-winning lifestyles.
Eyelashes are scratched. Dresses are made out of plastic six packs. There’s How to Climb a Mountain lesson maps. There’s democratic furniture (sawhorses and picnic tables). There’s a thermometer that goes all the way up to 350 degrees. There are seven ten-foot poles that are too heavy for me to touch you with. There are six outboard motors that were recovered from Monty and Shelly’s place in the sun. There’s a paint-stained stepladder wrapped in cotton duck canvas as if the ladder was some kind of dumpster dive stretcher bar.
There’s a picket fence from the Daily Plaza Drive-In Theater. Black bras. Knee torn jeans. Jellied toast. Nosebleeds. Bloody teeth. Giant tires sewn together, in a folk art way, that sound like Cisco Houston’s Dust & Dreams. There’s part of a custom Fender basement-tape guitar jawboned into a work boot strung up with out-of-tune shoelaces beside a quiet jar of shoe polish. Finally, plenty of tree trunks gnawed by those eco-friendly survivalist dam-building beavers.
There are no rehearsals.
All these doors connect because I locked myself in and I locked myself out.
