It’s All Been Said

“If I like a picture, I paint it.”
Ulrich Lamsfuss

The German artist Ulrich Lamsfuss appropriates the images he paints from a wide variety of sources. From luxury brand advertisements to documentary images, from nature photography to fashion spreads, all are grist for his mill. And it’s a mill that grinds exceeding slow and fine, as he reproduces the found image in oil paint, taking weeks if not months to complete that which was made in the blink of an eye.

As he says “The zeitgeist is defined by attention deficit disorder and that really makes me want to move slowly and with exactitude. So I slow it down to a maximum of ten images a year - in the end, my dream would be to keep on painting one image over and over again.”

A dream he partially realized in 2005 with his exhibition Pet Sounds. Lamsfuss painted multiples of each image in the exhibition and held simultaneous exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. Named after the Beach Boys 1966 concept album which has been likened to the expression of lost innocence, Lamsfuss mused to The Fader in relation to the exhibition's name choice “Maybe I am a little uneasy about being an artist.”

Growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s with radical parents, Lamsfuss is definitely uneasy with the spoken word. As he said in a Lombard Fried Gallery interview “My parents are teachers and active 68ers which made pretty clear to me that words are just words and that the power of pictures is more relevant to understand[ing].”

With his found pictures, Lamsfuss works in a studio setting “I need a steady private place for perfect contemplation” he says.  To which he added, “My painting-technique is basically none. It’s just about putting directly the right colour on the canvas exactly where I find it on the original. It is more about plotting. I wanted to have a straight, non-artistic, just dry, honest and evident surface (and work). You can follow every brushstroke; you can see and understand how it is done.”

About his choice of subject matter Lamsfuss says “Wherever I go somebody has been there before; everything is said just not by everybody. The only way of being authentic is by admitting that you can’t (really be differrent).

And as he told Claudia Seidel, not completely tongue in cheek, “Perhaps I’m quite classically an angry young man who gets angry that there’s nothing to get angry about any more.”

Lamsfuss’ current exhibition Nitidezza is on show at Paris’ Galerie Templon until the 30th of May.

The Price of Fame II

“Making art has never been a mystery to me.
It's never been something that's very difficult.”

Richard Prince

As a general rule of thumb anything you post on the internet you should expect to be stolen. And if you are lucky it will be by someone with a wider audience than your own and if you’re very lucky your name will be attached. It is what makes the internet in general and social media in particular work, although this act is now commonly called appropriation.

Within the arts appropriation has a long and glorious history which caused the 20th century master, Pablo Picasso to remark “Good artist’s copy, great artist’s steal.” Which for American artist Richard Prince, it’s a phrase that could be considered his calling card.  

From his Marlboro Man to his Nurses, Prince has appropriated other artist’s works made some slight alterations and called them his own. And now that he has become successful (read multi millionaire) from turning illustrations into art works the originators are starting to sue for breach of copyright.

Last year Price settled out of court a breach of copyright claim by Patrick Cariou, from whose 2000 book, “Yes Rasta”, Prince had lifted images for his series “Canal Zone.” One court said it was, a second court said it wasn’t and no doubt a trip to the Supreme Court was an expense nobody wanted.

In February of this year Price received the opening salvo of new breach of copyright suit in the form of a cease and desist letter from the Seattle-based photographer Donald Graham regarding his photograph “Rastafarian Smoking a Joint, Jamaica” which was included in Prince’s 2014 exhibition New Portraits. Whether Price was aware that Graham took the photograph is an open question as Prince lifted it from Instagram user @rastajay92 who had reposted it from @indigoochild.

There is no evidence at this time that cease and desist letters have been sent to the bloggers but then they are not selling prints which Hyperallergic reports “the artist’s so-called “Instagram paintings,” each of which, if we’re to believe an anonymous source of the New York Post, are selling for around $100,000.” 

Prince almost got it right when he told the Interview Magazine’s Glen O’Brien back in 2009 “But the art world is pretty tight even though the biggest thing that's happened to it is the auctions, which are the only reason people on the outside know anything about it.”

Prince’s current exhibition Original is on show at Gagosian’s 976 Madison Avenue, New York gallery until the 20th of June.

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