Richard Prince Nurse Paintings - Alex

These are some paintings from Richard Prince's nurse series, which were inspired by / drawn from the covers of a collection of 1960's pulp novels. Prince has often been known to work with both popular iconography as well as irony and both are fused together in this series.  Many of the paintings have to do with sensuality and/or violence, resurrecting the conception of nurses as objects of fantasy and adventure; Prince markedly steers clear of any representation of nurses as nurturing or caring figures. The fact that all of the nurses portrayed are women, as well as the expressionist style (which i love) blur the identities of the nurses and again steer us towards the idea of a "nurse prototype", which despite the changing face of the nursing profession today is still easily recognizable and perhaps even dear to us.