Pure Thoughts - Live Free or Die, 2007

Renowned for his use of appropriated imagery, Richard Prince is a painter and photographer whose works often reimagine existing photographs and media in an attempt to encourage the viewer to look at them from a different perspective – his Cowboy series features several ‘rephotographs’ (a photograph of a photograph) of the original Marlboro cigarette adverts that featured a lone cowboy; in choosing such an iconic subject, Prince hopes to strip it of context and simultaneously celebrate and expose it as a false construct. Asides from his ‘rephotography’, Prince has also created an extensive body of ‘joke paintings’ - the jokes are usually simple and rely on a punchline, one such example being “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name.” Prince was in inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock from an early age, noting that he was drawn to someone who was “fairly antisocial, kind of a loner, someone who was noncollaborative” - he was also inspired by the painting techniques of Willem de Kooning. (Artist website)