Apama strickland gallery - gallery amps / bangalore india - houston tx usa
Denise Prince is an American artist whose work spans photography, film, installation, and performance. Her practice is deeply rooted in critical theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, often exploring the intersection of commercial visual language and human desire. She attended the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency.
Prince is widely recognized for using the "visual syntax" of fashion and advertising—characterized by highly saturated colors and hyper-stylization—to subvert societal expectations.
The "Captivating Not Captive" Series: This major ten-year project reimagined high-fashion imagery (notably a Missoni catalog) by featuring individuals typically excluded from normalized beauty standards, thereby disrupting traditional aesthetics. Influenced by her long-term collaboration with philosopher and psychoanalyst Charles Merward, Prince’s work seeks to "lay bare the outsized role that fantasy plays in the construction of identity." She often describes her explorations as a way to understand Desire, which she defines as "the memory of the missing thing."
Conceptual Still Life: Her more recent work utilizes the tradition of European oil painting and 1960s-era cookbook imagery to examine how personal fantasies are constructed through the collection of objects.
Performance and Installation: Her practice includes "multimedia happenings," such as L'enfant Terrible (2016), which involved a choreographed dance of 12 girls in 1950s dressing gowns and an installation of twin beds to explore the loss of childhood innocence.
In December 2022, Denise held an installation and performed several performances labeled, “The Lollipop Girls” in Miami Beach at the Satellite Art Fair, an artist run, performance and alternative media fair.
Her work is held in many permanent collections, most notably, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Thomas J. Watson Library). She has been featured in Vogue Magazine, on PBS Television, and participated in the High Line Network’s New Monuments for New Cities project.