Arthur Jafa won the Venice Biennale's top prize in 2019. Richard Prince showed there in 2003. Now, in May 2023, they're exhibiting together for the first time — at the Fondazione Prada's Venice space, opening the same day as the Biennale itself.
The exhibition, titled "Helter Skelter" and curated by Nancy Spector (former artistic director of the Guggenheim), arranges their works in what the foundation calls "thematic juxtapositions." The idea is to show how these two artists, working across different decades and mediums, keep returning to the same obsessions.
Both Jafa and Prince have built their practice around the same raw material: the visual noise of contemporary culture. They pull from Marlboro ads and YouTube videos, comic books and celebrity gossip, album covers and social media. They appropriate, remix, and reframe — treating images as found objects to be rearranged rather than sources to be cited. It's an ethos that runs counter to the usual rules of art-world decorum, which is partly why their work has always felt urgent.
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Start Your News DetoxPrince came to prominence in the 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who recognized that images themselves — not just what they depict — had become the real subject matter. His "Cowboys" series rephotographed Marlboro advertisements, stripping them of their commercial intent and forcing viewers to look at them as aesthetic objects. Jafa's rise has been steeper and more recent. He emerged into wider view through the 2016 Made in L.A. biennial, then crystallized his reputation with "Love is the message, the message is Death" in 2017 — a film that layered Black cultural imagery, music, and abstraction into something that felt both personal and monumental.
What makes this pairing interesting isn't that they're similar — it's that they're working from the same intuition about how images circulate and what happens when you interrupt that circulation. The exhibition will also premiere a "long creative conversation" between the two artists, conversations that haven't been shown publicly before. That's the real draw: watching two artists who've spent decades mining the same cultural landscape talk about what they've found.
Miuccia Prada framed the Fondazione's 2023 programming as a "laboratory of ideas" — a space where artists and thinkers could push viewers to see urgent issues from angles they hadn't considered. This exhibition is exactly that kind of work.
