Hudson (Show)Room

Stephen Prina

Los Angeles, CA

July 06–October 01, 2000

about the artist

Stephen Prina was born in 1954 in Galesburg, Illinois and received his M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1980. His work has been included in numerous thematic exhibitions, including Departures (The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2000); Sunshine & Noir: Art in L.A. 1960-1997 (The Louisiana Museum, Denmark, 1997); 51st Carnegie International(Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 1990); A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1989).

Stephen Prina’s complex artworks examine the underpinnings of cultural production and consumption. His works further the investigations of representation and language explored by artists in the Conceptual movement of the 1970s. Prina’s objects, which are often serialized and long-term, draw attention to the making and preservation of cultural and art history, as well as the systems of the art business. Often questioning issues of authenticity, authorship, originality, and appropriation, Prina’s rigorous exercises challenge assumptions about the art object.

about the exhibition

ArtPace’s exhibition, “It was the best he could do at the moment,” reprise., includes an array of works from the past decade. Together they form a mini-retrospective, both a reprise and a continuation of his 1992-survey exhibition at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Such a referential approach is typical to Prina’s production—he freely layers associations from the external world (of film, music, and cultural history) and the internal world (of his own artistic past).

Central to the exhibition will be site-specific sculpture based upon ArtPace’s mailing list. Duplicate announcements of the show were printed and addressed for mailing; Prina displays the second set in the gallery as a serial sculpture—box after box of ordered names, potential audience. The institution’s constituents are presented as an index of ArtPace’s reach into the community. This work furthers Prina’s ongoing consideration of the art system by “framing” the objects surrounding its production, in this case, the marketing device of mailed invitations.

> back to top