Stephen Prina
27 May - 21 Aug 2011
© Stephen Prina
Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 1991
Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Köln
Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 1991
Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Köln
STEPHEN PRINA
As He Remembered It
27 May – 21 August, 2011
The American artist, musician, and composer Stephen Prina appropriates the works of other artists. The spectrum of his references includes theoretical, literary, and artistic models ranging from Theodor W. Adorno to Felix Gonzales-Torres, from pop music to the sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven. By restaging the original material, transposing it into other media or taking up individual motifs and varying structures, Prina creates multifaceted systems of reference in which personal, art-historical and musical narratives enrich one another. Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet (since 1988), for instance, is based on the pictures of the Impressionist painter Édouard Manet. Prina's graphical appropriation takes up the formats of the art-historical originals, but then replaces the pictorial content with monochrome surfaces. Stephen Prina's method, which explicitly combines various media, is moreover distinguished by open work structures that are subject to ongoing elaboration. He often produces adaptations of his own works for specific exhibitions, recontextualizing them in forever new ways in order to explore the relationship between the original artistic intention and the subsequent life of his objects. Beyond the wealth of quotations and references, Prina also undertakes a general reflection on the potential of the referential mode as a method in art.
Stephen Prina, b. Galesburg, Ill. (US) 1954, lives and works in Los Angeles (US) and Cambridge, Mass. (US).
As He Remembered It
27 May – 21 August, 2011
The American artist, musician, and composer Stephen Prina appropriates the works of other artists. The spectrum of his references includes theoretical, literary, and artistic models ranging from Theodor W. Adorno to Felix Gonzales-Torres, from pop music to the sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven. By restaging the original material, transposing it into other media or taking up individual motifs and varying structures, Prina creates multifaceted systems of reference in which personal, art-historical and musical narratives enrich one another. Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet (since 1988), for instance, is based on the pictures of the Impressionist painter Édouard Manet. Prina's graphical appropriation takes up the formats of the art-historical originals, but then replaces the pictorial content with monochrome surfaces. Stephen Prina's method, which explicitly combines various media, is moreover distinguished by open work structures that are subject to ongoing elaboration. He often produces adaptations of his own works for specific exhibitions, recontextualizing them in forever new ways in order to explore the relationship between the original artistic intention and the subsequent life of his objects. Beyond the wealth of quotations and references, Prina also undertakes a general reflection on the potential of the referential mode as a method in art.
Stephen Prina, b. Galesburg, Ill. (US) 1954, lives and works in Los Angeles (US) and Cambridge, Mass. (US).