Richard Prince must be an automobilophile. He collects car bonnets and turns them into works of art. He has a “bodyshop” next to his painting and photography studios in upstate New York devoted to the appropriation and appreciation of car parts. And when it comes to Buicks, Prince has the final word: a 1987 Buick Grand National, the ultimate streamlined silver bullet, the American metaphor in which you can go anywhere you want.

But Prince has taken his car worship one step farther. He has customised his car. He has wrapped it in a vinyl print of one of his photographs, spreading smiling faces, bare breasts and a soft rolling belly all over the bonnet, boot and windscreen. It has the sculptural shape of a Buick but with the bulges and hollows of two naked women imprinted on it.

The Buick (called Covering Hannah (1987 Grand National), 2008) is one of the newest works in the Serpentine Gallery's new survey show, Continuation, the first major British public exhibition of Prince's work, which opens on Thursday. It is a wide-ranging selection, chosen and curated by Prince, following on from his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York last year.

It covers from 1980 to the present, exploring in the most surreal and Princely terms the dystopian landscape of our technology-obsessed consumerist culture. To a British audience the show will seem bracingly American because Prince is fascinated with American culture - to the exclusion of all else. It also rams home that Prince's art is an acquired taste.

Prince is a key practitioner of appropriation art. He began in the late 1970s working with a camera. Post-Modernism was in full swing and Prince began rephotographing commercial photographs. His practice catapulted him into public consciousness in 2005 when his image Untitled (Cowboy), lifted from the Marlboro Man commercials, became the first photograph to fetch more than $1 million at auction.

Prince was born in 1949 and was 19 in 1968 when anti-Vietnam marches erupted in Washington. He embraced rebellion as a way of life. Underlying all his work over the past 30 years is the concept that appropriating, editing and reissuing existing work can be a creative process in itself.

Recent car bonnet sculptures (bonnet shapes painted in pale greens and greys) dominate the start of this Serpentine show, which leads into a central room hung with vast canvases. The first to greet you as you walk in is roughly 5.5m by 4m (18ft by 13ft), the biggest ever hung in this space. Entitled I Know a Guy, it consists of a couple of off-colour, authorless jokes painted in black on a white background.

Prince's Monochrome Joke series began in 1987 during a stay in Los Angeles. He silkscreened individual jokes on to planes of painted colour. The canvases are flat, banal and pristine, like any mass-produced object. They were designed as a joke against the art market of the 1980s, but the irony is that these anti-masterpieces have sold very well.

There follows a group of frankly mediocre landscape photographs and a sample from his Gangs series: images of semi-naked women posing on large motorbikes. A further ongoing series is his Nurse paintings: portrayals of sexy nurses plucked from the covers of pulpy medical romance novels.

In the next room we have a group of portrait photographs from 1980, a dreadful, kitschy orange cast-resin “tyre planter” and three paintings after de Kooning. These are semi-pornographic, collaged, inkjet prints overlaid with acrylic paint, the hands and feet distorted to an excessively large scale.

Painting is Prince's current obsession, but categories no longer count for him. All the traditional boundaries of art have been redrawn to let in new media, old junk and amateur fancies. Some of these are interesting. Some are not.

Richard Prince: Continuation is at the Serpentine Gallery (020-7402 6075) from Thursday to September 7

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