Raymond Pettibon @ New Museum, NYC

Raymond Pettibon
A Pen of All Work
New Museum, NYC
February 8 - April 16, 2017

Raymond Pettibon

No Title (This feeling is), 2011.

Pen and ink on paper, 37 ¼ x 49 ½ in (94.6 x 125.7 cm).

Private collection. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

In February 2017, the New Museum will open a major exhibition focusing on the work of RAYMOND PETTIBON (b. 1957, Tucson, AZ). For over thirty years, Pettibon has been chronicling the history, mythology, and culture of America with a prodigious and distinctive voice. Through his drawings’ signature interplay between image and text, he moves between historical reflection, emotional longing, poetic wit, and strident critique. Since the late 1960s, he has produced thousands of drawings and energetic installations that have been executed in museums and galleries around the world. These works poignantly evoke the country’s shifting values across time, from the idealistic postwar period in which he was born to the collapse of the American counterculture in the ’70s and ’80s to the painful military and social conflicts of the present.

Although Raymond Pettibon is unquestionably a pivotal figure of American art since the 1990s, he has never before had a major museum survey exhibition in New York. “Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work” at the New Museum will be the largest presentation of Pettibon’s work to date, featuring more than 700 drawings from the 1960s to the present. It will also include a number of his early self-produced zines and artist’s books, as well as several videos made in collaboration with fellow artists and his musician friends. This unique collection of objects and distinctly immersive installation will provide insight into the mind of one of the most influential and visionary living American artists.

Raymond Pettibon

No Title (Having read superman), 2003.

Pen and ink on paper, 30 ¼ x 22 ½ in (76.8 x 57.1 cm).

Courtesy David Zwirner, New York / London

Raymond Pettibon first received attention for his work when it was used in advertisements, zines, and record covers in the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene of the 1980s. His work became identified with a brash and iconoclastic visual style that would influence and speak for an entire generation of disaffected youth. In spite of this impact, Raymond Pettibon’s link to the punk scene has obscured the scope of his thematic and stylistic vision and the important place he occupies in the history of contemporary art. He stands alongside a generation of Los Angeles artists who have tackled the dissolution of American idealism head-on using fragments of its own visual culture.

From the beginning of his career, Raymond Pettibon has employed drawing and writing in tandem to connect radically distinctive cultural forms—from movies and literature to comics and TV—and pieces of narratives from throughout history and culture. His visual universe is populated by the ghosts of the last century of American history, including such disparate characters as Charles Manson, Gumby, Superman, and Ronald Reagan. Pettibon hints at familiar and forgotten narratives in his work, while using an expressive approach to color, line, and gesture in order to provoke complex emotional states. Whether his work is addressing surfing, baseball, war, or family, or channeling the voices of John Ruskin, Henry James, or Allen Ginsberg, it manages to suggest both personal and universal perspectives on our shared cultural experience.

Occupying the three main floors of the New Museum, “Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work” will be on view from February 8 to April 16, 2017. It is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by the New Museum and Phaidon Press Limited. The catalogue will include an interview with Raymond Pettibon conducted by Massimiliano Gioni, as well as contributions by Benjamin Buchloh, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Frances Stark, and Lynne Tillman.

New Museum Of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York NY 10002
www.newmuseum.org

Raymond Pettibon @ Sadie Coles HQ, London

Raymond Pettibon
Sadie Coles HQ, London
3 October - 17 November 2012

Sadie Coles HQ’s fifth exhibition with American artist Raymond Pettibon comprises an extensive series of recent drawings which manifest his art at its most eclectic.

Densely hung across the walls, the drawings involve Raymond Pettibon’s characteristic integration of disparate imagery and fragments of handwritten text lifted and adapted from myriad sources. His style shifts fitfully within and between the works, ranging from graphic line drawing in charcoal (for instance, a rapidly crosshatched Bible) which invokes his early cartoons, to expressionistic and painterly forms executed in combinations of gouache, acrylic and crayon.

Raymond Pettibon’s chaotic agglomerative method is equivalent to the ‘cut up’ technique adopted by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in their book The Third Mind (1977). In an extension of this methodology, certain of Pettibon’s recent works literally employ collage. In No Title (Re-up periscope), pornographic excerpts from different drawings mass together into a bustling orgy, while a scribbled cartoon of a gun being discharged provides a comic superscript.

Raymond Pettibon’s quotations, aphorisms and fragments of dialogue – free-floating and suspended from context – vary between bizarre interpolations and apposite subscripts. The result is a continual lurch in mood – from the sensationalist to the mundane to the absurdist to the poetically ambivalent. A blotted Rorschach design is given the wry tagline “Readers who have any tincture of psychology know how much is to be inferred from this”. In No Title (Be content at), John Ruskin’s instructions on drawing (“Be content at present if you find your hand gaining command over the curves”) accompany an image of a naked woman holding her breasts – perhaps a parodic affront to Ruskin’s supposed sexual reticence.

Religious and art-historical tropes are paraphrased and bastardised it the same way as quotations and words (“Tryck Whutuyp” written beside Christ on the cross, is an invented variant of “whattup” or “whassup”). Christ and skulls appear variously; and a bowl of fruit implies an improvised still life. Many of the works also revisit themes and figures which have recurred throughout Pettibons’ career. Baseball players appear in works such as No Title (A hop, skiyp,), showing a lumbering figure bowling, or in the form of a randomly inserted mugshot of Johnny Broaca. As in much of Pettibon’s art, the sordid underbelly of American life is glimpsed: No Title (Do I bother) pictures a seedy nightclub, the gobbets of text conveying the sexual tension between a singer and dancer.

Raymond Pettibon’s works muse continually on the power dynamic between image and text – the capacity for one to inflect or undermine the other. Certain drawings veer into an autobiographical and self-reflexive mode: No Title (Of myself what) portrays Pettibon in a sports jacket with the epithet “Team Comes First” (possibly a fictional self-image). The work No Title (Missing accomplices. They) plays on its own fragmentariness through a jumble of sound bites. These reflect the slippery interflow of voices – public pronouncements, internal soliloquies, media jargon, clichés, street slang and poetry – defining Pettibon’s art.

Raymond Pettibon was born in 1957 in Tuscon, Arizona, and studied at UCLA in Los Angeles. As a young graduate he worked as a maths teacher before embarking on an artistic career, designing album covers for Black Flag and becoming associated with the Los Angeles Punk scene. In recent years Pettibon has numerous major solo shows including Whuytuyp, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012); ‘v-boom’, Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany (2007); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005). Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2010 Pettibon received the prestigious Oskar Kokoschka prize. Raymond Pettibon lives and works in Los Angeles.

SADIE COLES HQ
69 South Audley St, London W1K 2QZ
www.sadiecoles.com