The Milan-based Fondazione Prada will stage a two-person exhibition of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at its Venice space during the upcoming Biennale.
Opening to the public on May 9, the same day as the Biennale, the exhibition carries the title “Helter Skelter” and is curated by Nancy Spector, the former artistic director of the Guggenheim Museum.
The exhibition will be organized around “a series of thematic juxtapositions” of both Prince’s and Jafa’s works that will “illuminate each of their practices and tease out shared subject matter and mutual obsessions,” according to a press release. It will also debut a “long creative conversation” between the two artists that has not been previously exhibited publicly.
The two artists, who were born a decade apart, are both known for mining pop culture to create their work and, per a release, “share an ethos of lawlessness when it comes to the appropriation and manipulation of images siphoned from movies, pulp novels, comic books, YouTube videos, sci-fi stories, album covers, record sleeves, rock ‘n’ roll posters, first-edition Beat volumes, news reels, celebrity memorabilia, and social-media posts.”
Prince has been a prominent artist since the 1980s, when he came to fame as part of the Pictures Generation. Among his best-known early series is “Cowboys,” for which he rephotographed advertisements featuring the Marlboro Man. Jafa’s rise as one of today’s most closely watched artists is more recent. An accomplished cinematographer, he came to prominence first by his inclusion in the 2016 edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, and then with the debut of his acclaimed 2017 film Love is the message, the message is Death, which ARTnews deemed the best artwork of the 21st century so far.
Both Jafa and Prince are no stranger to the circus of the Venice Biennale. Both have participated in the Biennale’s main exhibition: Prince in the 2003 edition, in a section curated by Francesco Bonami and Daniel Birnbaum, and Jafa in the 2019 one, curated by Ralph Rugoff. For his participation, Jafa won the Golden Lion, the event’s top prize.
In its Milan exhibition spaces, running concurrently to the Jafa-Prince show, the Fondazione Prada will have exhibitions dedicated to Hito Steyerl, Mona Hatoum, Kali Malone, and Cao Fei.
In a statement, Miuccia Prada, the president and founder of the foundation and one of the world’s top collectors, said, “In 2026, our institution will try to operate as a laboratory of ideas—an experimental platform that continuously re-constitutes itself in response to the transformations of our social and cultural landscape. Artists and intellectuals from diverse generations and backgrounds will push us to frame urgent issues from multiple viewpoints, challenge current ideas, and think more profoundly.”
