RICHARD PRINCE: FREAKS

NAHMAD CONTEMPORARY, 2023

New York | 2023

Richard Prince’s FREAKS exhibition traces its origins to his 1972 “dead” heads, which he characterizes as “the first things I did that ever had any soul.” In 1998 these heads found bodily form in his Hippie Drawings series, celebrating counterculture with vibrant figures sketched (some with Crayola) in a childlike aesthetic of outsider art. These figures re-emerge nearly twenty years later in the High Times paintings, violently colorful group portraits with a collage aesthetic, depicting a vibrant, anti-establishment community. FREAKS, a show of new works, replaces the safety and joie de vivre of the collective with the isolation and melancholy of community, dissolved—the lone hippie is a “FREAK.” The exhibition design provides distinct viewing spaces catered to two new bodies of work. The main exhibition space is devoted to the FREAKS painting series, hung with generous negative space—crisp white walls—isolating each canvas. The artworks command individual focus; can be viewed in their lonesomeness. A smaller room showcases considerably more—nearly forty—pen and paper, black and white portraits. Arranged in a tight grid and juxtaposed against dark blue walls, the viewing experience is both intimate and immersive. But intimacy should not be mistaken for comfort—the portraits are isolated in individual seas of broad white matting, arranged with rigid precision, effecting a vaguely carceral environment.