Richard Pettibone @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC - Endless Variation

Richard Pettibone: Endless Variation

The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

October 27, 2018 - January 19, 2019

“I wished I had stuck with the idea of just painting the same painting like the soup can and never painting another painting. When someone wanted one, you would just do another one. Does anyone do that now?”  -Andy Warhol, 1981 [1]

The FLAG Art Foundation presents RICHARD PETTIBONE: Endless Variation, on view on its 9th floor. A prominent figure in the Pop, Post Pop, and Appropriation Art movements, Richard Pettibone creates small-scale replicas of iconic masterpieces by artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Roy Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol. The intimately-sized works, some as small as two by two inches, speak to themes of reproduction, originality, and authorship—ideas as relevant in today’s art world as when he began painting in the early 1960s. Richard Pettibone’s work continues a line of questioning that began with Duchamp and ran through successive generations of artists: What does it mean to appropriate an image of an image of an image?

The exhibition features work that spans 1964 to 2018, focusing on self-portraiture, seriality, and photorealism—three major themes within Richard Pettibone’s oeuvre that the artist continually, and often humorously, critiques and reinterprets. The artist’s facility with representation is particularly evident in his photorealistic paintings and “combine” works, which feature multiple canvases collaged together. Presented en masse, this rarely seen part of the artist’s practice sheds light onto Richard Pettibone’s interest in the intersection of style, pastiche, and art history. Juxtaposed with fine art reproductions of the satin ballgowns from Jean-August Dominique Ingres’s Princess de Broglie, 1853, and the rigid geometry of Frank Stella’s Union Pacific, 1950, are testosterone-fueled images of dirt bikes, race cars, and playboy center-folds.

FLAG’s south gallery is dedicated to the artist’s recurring and career-spanning recreations of Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans, with more than 150 canvases on view. Richard Pettibone he first encountered in the artist’s seminal 1962 Soup Cans exhibition at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. “I remember that show so clearly,” Pettibone recounts, “The 32 cans were shown in two rooms, and when you walked into this room, all the paintings were all the same. And then you walked into the second room, and it was more of the same; it was the craziest show I’ve ever seen! But slowly I realized, ‘oh my god, they’re all different flavors.’”

Richard Pettibone’s self-portraits place the artist as subject matter, revealing more about his life and influences, all laden with humor and poetic wit. Installed chronologically, these works take shape in various forms, ranging from the artist’s own fingerprints, to paintings based on and scaled to candid polaroids, to series inspired by Duchamp’s Wanted: $2,000 Reward, 1923, posters and Coeurs Volants (Fluttering Hearts), 1936. The latter nods to Richard Pettibone’s recent heart attack, the date of which, “October 16, 2016,” is inscribed at the top of the painting. Like Marcel Duchamp, Richard Pettibone believed everything was a readymade and up for grabs, and his work is infused with a reverence for the artists that he was appropriating – often simultaneous with the artists creating their works—offering an inventive commentary on 20th-century art.

Richard Pettibone: Recent Works is concurrently on view at Castelli Gallery from September 12 - November 21, 2018.

RICHARD PETTIBONE (b. 1938, Alhambra, CA) is an artist living and working in Charlotteville, NY. A pioneer of appropriation art, Richard Pettibone has dedicated his career to creating miniature replicas of artworks by iconic contemporary artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Initially constructed to match the size of images of the original works he found in Artforum magazine, Richard Pettibone’s small-scale facsimiles address themes of reproduction, seriality, and authorship. In 1962, Richard Pettibone received his MFA from the Otis Art Institute, CA. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Richard Pettibone: Recent Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Richard Pettibone: 64 Paintings, 9 Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, (2016); Richard Pettibone (1964-2009), Galerie Mitterrand, Paris, France (2014); Richard Pettibone-Paintings and Sculpture: 1964-2003, David Nolan Gallery, New York,  NY (2013); among others. Recent group exhibitions include Miniatures by Master Artists, Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd., New York, NY (2018); Very Appropriate, Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2017); Marcel Duchamp Fountain – An Homage, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY (2017); The Natural Order of Things, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico (2016); The Appropriationnist (Against and With), Villa du Parc, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2015); among others. Several institutions have honored him with significant retrospective exhibitions, including The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 2005, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2005, and the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA, in 2006.

[1] Shaar, Elisa. “Richard Pettibone: Painting the Same Painting Then and Now,” Richard Pettibone, September 10-October 26, 2013, published in 2013 by Castelli Gallery.

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Richard Pettibone @ Castelli Gallery, New York - Recent Works

Richard Pettibone: Recent Works 

Castelli Gallery, New York 

September 12 - November 21, 2018 

RICHARD PETTIBONE 

Heart Attack #4, 2018 

Oil on canvas, 11 x 8 ½ inches 

© Richard Pettibone, courtesy Castelli Gallery 

Castelli Gallery presents Richard Pettibone: Recent Works. The exhibition features new paintings by the artist, which revisit subjects that have been pivotal to Richard Pettibone’s work throughout his career. The largest series of paintings on view engage with Marcel Duchamp’s famous cover design for the 1936 issue of the avant-garde art magazine, Cahiers D’Art. The design consists of three concentric hearts in red and blue, which produce an optical illusion of depth and movement. Owing to this illusion, Marcel Duchamp called the image Coeurs Volants, or Fluttering Hearts. Although Duchamp’s work has long been a source of inspiration for Richard Pettibone, this particular image took on an added personal meaning for him after he suffered a heart attack in 2016. In the charming title and image of Duchamp’s Fluttering Hearts, Pettibone found a compelling, if dichotomous, resonance with his own physical experience. The act of reproducing Duchamp’s design by hand not only served as a therapeutic process, but also provided a tangible means of connecting the seemingly contradictory realities of Duchamp’s playful image and the gravity of Richard Pettibone’s own condition.

Other works in the exhibition include paintings of a Shaker chair in the artist’s signature photo realist style. Richard Pettibone first became fascinated by Shaker furniture in the late 1980s when he moved to upstate New York and found himself living near the Shaker Museum in Mount Lebanon. This exposure gained him a deep appreciation for Shaker artisans’ dedication to craftsmanship, a quality that likewise characterizes Richard Pettibone’s own work. The specific inspiration for this series of paintings is a Shaker chair, which the artist bought in 1990. At the time, the chair cost him $2,500. He recently discovered, however, that the same type of chair now sells at auction for only $400. Seen in the light of shifting popular tastes and market values, the chair became a renewed source of interest for Richard Pettibone. Placing the piece of furniture outside on the deck of his house, he painted it as it appeared in the natural sunlight. In these images, the chair is represented independent of such arbitrary signs of worth as price and taste; its significance is seemingly no more nor less than the light it displaces, measurable by the shadow it casts.

A third series of paintings in the exhibition responds to a market trend in the opposite direction. In 1965, Richard Pettibone created his first appropriation of Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, with the financial help of a friend who worked at the local post office. The appropriation was displayed later that year at the prominent Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. As a token of his gratitude, the artist eventually gave the work to his friend as a gift. Over fifty years later, on March 10, 2017, Richard Pettibone’s Bicycle Wheel sold at auction for £62,500. As in the case of the Shaker chair, this fluctuation in the artwork’s worth prompted the artist to revisit his original appropriation by creating a series of paintings honoring this new layer of significance. In reference to the auction that catalyzed this change, Richard Pettibone’s new series of paintings, titled My First Duchamp Bicycle Wheel, 1965, represents not the sculpture itself, but the sculpture’s image published in the auction catalogue.

While the three series of paintings included in the exhibition are in many ways quintessential examples of Richard Pettibone’s work—revisiting some of the artist’s most important inspirations and showcasing his characteristic style—they also present something new in the strong autobiographical through-linethat unites them. In this way, the show as a whole expresses one of the major themes conveyed by each series individually: the idea that although the object itself may remain the same, its value—whether emotional, conceptual, or financial—evolves over time.

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18 East 77 Street, New York, NY 10075

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