If you said that the paintings and drawings by Michael Zavros in The Prince were an example of appropriation, you would really only be half-right. Although the images that make up this exhibition look, essentially, exactly the same as their sources, their thematic and systematic selection and cropping sets up a subtle dialogue with the viewer, and reveals a great deal about the artist himself.
Richard Prince plays a big part in this exhibition. Zavros has ‘reauthored’ Prince’s famous rephotographs of Marlboro advertisements from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, and it is these images that make up a bulk of the exhibition.1 You may think that an appropriation of an appropriation would be a cold, static affair, but instead you are presented with a warm, lovingly crafted image that, apart from the composition, is nothing like its predecessor. The idea that these works are a painting of a photograph of a magazine ad made from a staged photograph becomes inconsequential when you begin to spend time admiring both the astounding technical skill of the art making and the ultra-manly men being depicted. If Richard Prince returned the cowboy to the American public, then Michael Zavros has now put him on a pedestal. This now mythical man (real name [ironically]: Darrell Winfield),2 is effortlessly riding the plains, being tough, smoking, and living forever in a way that the rest of us can only ever dream of. It is somewhat emasculating.
The Suit Suite (1990) is a large series of small paintings of advertising materials promoting high-class men’s fashion, flowing across an entire wall of the gallery. Again, the technicalities of the paintings draw you in, but this time the