Richard Prince "Ripple Paintings" at GLADSTONE GALLERY

James Kalm was a young artist just arrived in New York when he gradually became aware of the “Pictures Generation” artists. This close knit clique of photographic based conceptual artists was the antithesis of everything your correspondent believed in at the time. Cool, slick, fashionable, and in collaboration with some of the most powerful and exclusionary members of the critical and academic establishment, this sensibility was an undeniable force to be dealt with. Nearly forty years latter, long after the dust has settled on old aesthetic battles, the “Pictures” artists are now the deeply ensconced pillars of the New York art establishment. With the “Ripple Paintings” bad-boy Prince revisits his youth to retrieve cartoons (many by Whitney Darrow) from 1967-1970s Playboy Magazines. After the selection he then places the pages on the studio floor pours and splashes gouache puddles on the cartoons, and lets them dry over night. Returning the next day the pieces have developed ripples and puckering in the drying process. These pages are then photographed blown-up and digitally printed on Ab-Ex sized canvases, a kind of slacker layering of Pop Art and Post Painterly Abstraction. This program was recorded December 7, 2017 in Chelsea.