Richard Prince: Posters Exhibition @ Galerie Max Hetzler, Marfa, Texas

Richard Prince: Posters

Galerie Max Hetzler, Marfa, Texas

Through 7 December 2025

Richard Prince 

Untitled, 2016 

Courtesy of Richard Prince Studio

Hetzler presents Posters, a solo exhibition of works by Richard Prince, for the gallery’s annual presentation in Marfa, Texas, through December 7, 2025.

One of the foremost representatives of appropriation art, Richard Prince has been recontextualising images and ideas from mass media, advertising and entertainment since the 1970s. Often based on products of everyday American culture, his practice is one of ‘post-production’, which reworks cultural phenomena and their attributes to rewrite received narratives and our understanding of history.

The present exhibition brings together a large body of Richard Prince’s Poster works on canvas and on paper, created between 2014 and 2024. The large canvases show reproductions of advertisements for mail-order posters, as were often found at the back of magazines in the second half of the 20th century. Hugely popular at the time, these printed images represent touchstones of early counter-cultural magazines, which are among Richard Prince’s long-term interests. The motifs of political slogans and far-out art in the form of cheap posters are singled out and chosen by the artist. They find their origins in the hippie head-shop culture of the late ’60s, which also encompassed magazines, music and comedy records. Taped-off and blocked-out from the pages where they were listed, the images have been blown up so that the resulting works are far larger than the original posters.

In their seemingly arbitrary selection, the poster images combine anti-war slogans, reproductions of Modern art, graphic-design interpretations of nude couples, and pictures of cats in sometimes humorously disparate compilations. The revolutionary attitude of the late ’60s student protests is juxtaposed against the self-indulgence of hippie culture in this side-by-side illustration of popular visual language.

If cultural attitudes are transported through everyday imagery, then  Richard Prince makes them transparent by applying the focus of his artistic practice to these source materials. Method and implication are translated into different contexts and, with his meticulous attention to detail, the artist decodes the communication of contemporary visual language and the ideas which are concealed within it.

Artist Richard Prince

Richard Prince (b. 1949, Panama Canal Zone) lives and works in Upstate New York. Prince’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in international institutions, including Georgia Museum of Art, Athens (2024); Louisiana Museum of Art, Humblebaek; The Karpidas Collection (both 2022–2023); Museum for Modern Art, Weserburg (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019–2020); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Malba; Espace Louis Vuitton, Beijing; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (all 2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017–2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2014); Picasso Museum, Malaga (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon (2011); Serpentine Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (both 2008); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007–2008); Kunsthalle Zürich (2002); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001); and MAK, Vienna (2000), among others. The artist participated in the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2003, as well as the Whitney Biennial in 2004, 1997, 1987 and 1985.

Works by Richard Prince are in the collections of international museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; The Broad, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston; Kunstmuseum Basel; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection, Venice; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

GALERIE MAX HETZLER

1976 Antelope Hills Road, Marfa, Texas

www.maxhetzler.com

Richard Prince: Posters

Galerie Max Hetzler, Marfa, Texas, 17 May – 7 December 2025

Zoe Leonard @ Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas - "Al río / To the River" Exhibition

Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River

Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas

October 12, 2024 - June 2025

ZOE LEONARD

Al río / To the River (detail), 2016–2022 

Gelatin silver prints, C-prints and inkjet prints 

© Zoe Leonard. 

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and Hauser & Wirth.

The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati presents an exhibition of ZOE LEONARD’s Al río / To the River. The photographic work follows the course of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo where the river is used to define the boundary between the United States and Mexico. Zoe Leonard’s work contemplates the intricate cultural, social, political, ecological, and economic landscapes that comprise the 1,200 mile stretch of river from Ciudad Juárez and El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico and poses the question: what does it mean to ask a body of water to perform a political task? “The shifting nature of a river—which floods periodically, changes course, and carves new channels—is at odds with the political task it is asked to perform,” says Zoe Leonard.

Known for her work across photography, sculpture, and installation, Zoe Leonard has long explored the physical and bodily act of looking, often underscoring tensions between the natural world and human-built environments. Her work You see I am here after all (2008), made on-site at Dia Beacon and exhibited from 2008 to 2011, is composed of thousands of postcards of Niagara Falls from the early 1900s through the 1970s. It considers the role of photography in constructing American historical narratives and myths. In her large-scale installation 100 North Nevill Street, on view at the Chinati Foundation from 2013 to 2015, the artist transformed a former ice plant building into a camera obscura that projected the ever-changing state of the external environment in Marfa. As with all of her camera obscura works, the piece was made on-site in response to the existing architecture, history, and land

In late 2016, Zoe Leonard began to photograph the Rio Grande/Río Bravo—and the ways in which humans live in relation to it—from various perspectives in the United States and Mexico. The artist crossed back and forth from one side of the river to the other (and from one country to another), creating layered and thought-provoking compositions that draw attention to the complexity of the river as a porous channel, a source of life, and a politicized site. The work depicts the water, the land that surrounds it, and the infrastructures built along, across, and through it, offering viewers a variety of frames through which to think about the movement of people, animals, cars, boats, information, and goods.

Al río is comprised of several hundred photographs, structured in groupings, or ‘passages,’ and in this exhibition, a selection will be installed across three buildings on the grounds of Chinati. By arranging the photographs in passages, Zoe Leonard uses seriality to show actions unfolding; quotidian scenes of rest and play contrast with acts of policing and government control. The images are deeply specific and rooted in place, but they also relate to our shared world—one in which daily life is disrupted by fences, checkpoints, and surveillance. The project engages with histories of image-making from abstraction to documentary to digital surveillance, and, in doing so, reconsiders representational tropes, mythologies about the American West and Mexico, and the role of photography in shaping our perceptions of borders and rivers.

The opening of Al río / To the River at the Chinati Foundation—its first institutional presentation in the Americas—follows its debut at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (2022), and subsequent exhibitions at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2022) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2023). Hauser & Wirth presented a related gallery exhibition of excerpts from Al río in New York in 2022, as did Capitain Petzel in Berlin (2022) and Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Milan (2023/2024). At Chinati, where artworks are permanently installed throughout the former military spaces of Fort D.A. Russell, Zoe Leonard’s photographs will respond to—and sometimes mirror—the surrounding environment. When traveling between exhibition spaces, visitors may notice familiar subjects, like the mountains in the distance or a passing border patrol vehicle.

The exhibition is accompanied by a two-volume publication, also entitled Al río / To the River. Edited by poet Tim Johnson, designed by Joseph Logan, and published by Hatje Cantz, the book features a selection of Zoe Leonard’s photographs and a compilation of writings by artists, poets, historians, musicians, and scholars with an interest in the politics, ecology, and cultures that intersect at the river. Both Johnson and his partner Caitlin Murray, Director of the Chinati Foundation, are longtime friends of the artist, who first came to Marfa in 2006. When Donald Judd established the foundation in 1986, he invited his friends to install work there; Leonard’s exhibition expands upon this history of long-term collaboration and conversation among friends.

ZOE LEONARD (born 1961 in Liberty, New York; lives and works in New York, New York and Marfa, Texas) balances rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work with photography, sculpture, and installation. Employing seriality and shifting perspectives, and with an attention to the materiality of photography, Zoe Leonard’s practice probes the politics of representation and display. Zoe Leonard explores themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. Her photography invites us to contemplate the role that the medium plays in constructing histories and shaping our perceptions of the world around us. More than its focus on any particular subject, Zoe Leonard’s work encourages the viewer to consider the act of looking itself, as a complex and conditional process. 

CHINATI FOUNDATION

Marfa, Texas 79843

www.chinati.org

Drawings by Dan Flavin, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas - Dan Flavin, Drawings 1962-1975 & untitled (to my father, D. Nicholas Flavin, 1891-1974), 1974

Dan Flavin, Drawings 1962-1975 & untitled (to my father, D. Nicholas Flavin, 1891-1974), 1974

Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas

October 4, 1997 - May 1998

The Chinati Foundation will present an exhibition of drawings by DAN FLAVIN that will open on the occasion of the museum's Open House celebration on October 4. It will be the first time in over twenty years that this aspect of Dan Flavin's oeuvre will be shown; the work was last exhibited in the US at the St. Louis Museum of Art in 1973 and the Fort Worth Art Museum in 1976. The last European showing was at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1975. This comprehensive survey contains over one hundred drawings executed between 1962 and 1975. During the mid 70s, Dan Flavin replaced these 'rough sketches' with 'diagrams' which were done after the installation in fluorescent light had been realized. His 'rough sketches,' on the other hand, are a direct reflection of Flavin's thoughts and ideas during the development of a work.

The earliest sketches in this exhibition relate to a series of "Icons," Dan Flavin's earliest works to incorporate electric light. Only eight of these Icons were ever realized ‚ seven of which are currently on view at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. The drawings show that Dan Flavin explored many additional possibilities, and had already conceived specific arrangements that would later be realized in large scale fluorescent works.

The selection of drawings at Chinati will concentrate on works in relation to architecture. The first indication of a 'fluorescent room' dates back to 1963. From 1966 on, there are designs for installations occupying entire rooms or single works for a wall, corner, corridor, or stairway. The sketches do not so much present finished works, but reflect the thoughts leading up to them. Often occupying very small pieces of paper, these drawings can be regarded as notes, and some are indeed densely surrounded by the artist's notations. They provide insight into Dan Flavin's working process and are an indispensable resource for a thorough understanding of his work.The exhibition will also include one large fluorescent work from 1974: untitled (in memory of my father, D. Nicholas Flavin, 1891-1974).

The exhibition of drawings is related to a significant large scale project Dan Flavin designed for the Chinati Foundation. This work will consist of fluorescent light barriers to be installed in six buildings on the museum's grounds, illuminating their interiors with different constellations and intensities of blue, green, yellow and pink. The initial plans for this project date back to 1981 and once realized, this permanent work will be Dan Flavin's largest. The museum expects to complete the work by the fall of 1999. An illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition with a text by Marianne Stockebrand will be published before the show's conclusion.

THE CHINATI FOUNDATION

Marfa, TX 79843

www.chinati.org