Blum & Poe is very pleased to announce Richard Prince: New Portraits, the artist's first solo exhibition in Japan in almost twenty years. Prince has pioneered appropriation since the mid-1970s, mining images from mass media, advertising, and entertainment to subvert and redefine concepts of authorship and ownership. The new portraits update this strategy and continue Prince's exploration of photography through the platform of Instagram. Drawn to certain users, Prince traverses an illimitable network of links, jumping from one account to another, scanning through postings, reading endless texts, discarding, collecting, commenting, and cementing. He captures images that appear to be products of the medium itself; these portraits belong to an infinite stream of image distribution, catalyzing exhibitionism and voyeurism. The artist's comments - non sequiturs, jokes, quotes, oxymorons, and emojis - embolden his authorship in this enlivened new direction in portraiture. In a fusion of painting and photography, image and text, and authorship and freedom, intervention becomes composition and the written word becomes brushstroke, handled with a signature.

Richard Prince was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949 and lives and works in New York.

All images: Richard Prince, Untitled (portrait), 2014, Inkjet on canvas, 65 3/4 x 48 3/4 inches (167 x 123.8 centimeters) ©Richard Prince. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe