Free love

This small hardback book documents Richard Prince’s series of ‘Free Love’ paintings from 2016, and the exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in which they were first shown. For this series of paintings, Prince collected a group of nudist cartoons by John Dempsey (1919-2002), whose drawings were a staple of Playboy magazine for five decades. Prince enlarged the vintage drawings into inkjet prints, and drew ‘hippie drawings’ – of the kind that populated his work from the late 1980s – over the tops of the appropriated images. In these superimposed hippie drawings, Prince cites the Modernist titans who have recurred in his work – above all Willem de Kooning and Pablo Picasso. Vestiges of avant-garde painting are brought into collision with – or wrapped around – louche cartoons.