By John McWhinnie/The Gagosian Gallery
The Tiffany Paintings reflect Prince’s continuing attentiveness to the recurring patterns and suggestive potential of advertising, honed by years of perusing newspapers and magazines. These almost abstract, monochrome paintings recognize the plain yet distinctive advertisements that New York’s most famous jewelry brand has run daily for many years in the upper right hand corner of the same page of The New York Times. The works also echo another classic, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, whose object of desire, Holly Golightly, lures admirers only to elude them later.
These terse, tenuous combines of material reference and literary allusion are comprised of the aforementioned Tiffany ads, scanned news events, obituaries, and the occasional autobiographical note, painted over in a manner evocative of post-war Abstract Expressionism.
Reviewed by IR Staff