Spring 2026

Richard Prince

Untitled (str8boycore), 2014

Inkjet on canvas

From Richard Prince’s New Portraits series, this work appropriates an Instagram image, preserving its username and comment thread to expose the mechanics of online self-presentation. The stylized male torso—both intimate and performative—becomes a site of projection, while the embedded text introduces a voyeuristic dynamic.

As in Prince’s earlier appropriations, the work challenges ideas of authorship and ownership, reframing the portrait as a product of circulation, where identity is constructed through the interplay of image, platform, and audience.

Installed horizontally in our current presentation, V.C., V.C., V.C. (1979) by Thomas Downing shifts from a vertical field into a panoramic pulse.

Acrylic on canvas, 87 5/8 x 46 1/4 inches.

Downing’s hand-painted matrix of red circles—each subtly inflected—creates a vibration between structure and sensation. Turned on its side, the work reads less like a column and more like a horizon: expansive, rhythmic, and quietly optical.

A painting that rewards stillness. The longer you look, the more it moves

Richard Prince

Cowboys & Girlfriends, 1992

From his Girlfriends series, Richard Prince isolates and rephotographs images of women whose direct, quasi-seductive gazes become the focal point of the work. Removed from their original context, these glances hover between invitation and construction, revealing the coded language of desire shaped by mass media. Produced in 1992, the works reflect a pivotal moment in Prince’s practice, where appropriation sharpens into a precise meditation on image, authorship, and the performance of femininity.

Damien Hirst’s The Last Supper (1999–2000) series appropriates the visual language of pharmaceutical packaging to probe the rituals of consumption, belief, and authority in contemporary culture. In Duck Liver, Hirst replaces the promise of nourishment or healing with a disquieting substitution: a luxury food product framed as medicine, complete with clinical typography and dosage instructions. The work collapses distinctions between indulgence and cure, exposing how both are mediated through systems of branding and trust.

Rendered as a unique silkscreen on aluminum, the piece carries the cool detachment of industrial production while remaining singular—an object that mimics mass circulation yet resists it. As in much of Hirst’s practice, the viewer is positioned between attraction and unease: the seductive clarity of design gives way to a deeper questioning of what we consume, why we believe in it, and who authorizes those beliefs.