RICHARD PRINCE’S TELLS
Tell Me Everything, Museo Jumex
There’s just something about the American West that is both timeless and enthralling, a ruggedness like wind-tumbled hills rendered velvet by grasses and seared by sunlight. It’s no wonder that long after the Marlboro cigarette went out of fashion, the Marlboro man can, frankly, still get it.
Richard Prince mastered the world of scintillating Americana throughout the duration of his career as an artist, and at the Museo Jumex you can get close enough to the American dream to smell its cologne. The first major survey show of his work in Latin America, Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything offers up the most powerful touchstones of his lifetime arranged in a series of vignettes entitled, “Cowboys, “Girlfriends,” “Jokes” and “Cartoons,” as well as a selection of early photography, painting and sculpture explorations. Works span the 1970s to the present, and capture how Prince’s point of view developed a patina over time, and how the creative media he employed shifted as he moved from photography to rephotography to paint and beyond.
You’ll find something with grit, something sensual, and something powerfully undone around every corner of the show. What makes our breath catch in our throat is the thoroughly tangible sense of the man behind it all––his kinks and his beliefs both rolled into each piece like a hand-cut cigarette, addictive as hell and shamelessly intoxicating. We can see why one of the Untitled (Cowboy) images was named one of the “most influential images of all time” by Time magazine.
It’s even more stimulating when inhaled alongside Prince’s work capturing biker babes splayed across Harley chop-shop handlebars and fishnetted legs flexed along the body of a hotrod.
The nature of working in rephotography –– appropriating others’ existing photographs into new artwork of one’s own––is provocative in itself, and in Prince’s case landed him in the defendant’s seat in a number of copyright infringement cases. But to us, this only serves to add interest to his work.
Everything they could do, he could make better.
See for yourself at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, where Richard Prince: Tell Me Everything is on view through February 7, 2027.
Note: Exhibition organized by Museo Jumex. Curated by Kit Hammonds, Chief Curator of the museum, in collaboration with Richard Prince; and Natalia Vargas, Curatorial Assistant.
Richard Prince, Tell Me Everything (Man), 2020. Courtesy Richard Prince Studio © Richard Prince