Raymond Pettibon's unsettling universe takes over Musée Picasso
Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Their religion is...), 1987 © Raymond Pettibon. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Photo: Kerry McFate.
PARIS.—
Alongside the exhibition Philip Guston. The Irony of History, the Musée national Picasso-Paris is devoting an exhibition to American artist Raymond Pettibon, with the support of David Zwirner Gallery. Through seventy drawings and around ten fanzines, the exhibition, spanning five decades, explores the ironic and unsettling universe of this major contemporary artist.
A self-taught artist born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, Raymond Pettibon emerged in the late 1970s, designing album covers and ephemera for the punk rock band Black Flag, formed in Hermosa Beach, California. He also began exhibiting and self-publishing his early drawings, zines, and artist’s books, which incorporated the DIY aesthetic of underground comics, flyers, and fanzines characteristic of the subculture at the time.
Pettibon began exhibiting widely in the 1990s. Since that time, he has gained widespread recognition for work that draws from a wide range of sources, including literature, art history, popular culture, religion, politics, and sports. Resolutely anti authoritarian, Pettibon’s biting depictions of hippies, surfers, baseball players, politicians, superheroes, and cartoon characters—among other subjects—paint a caustic portrait of post-1960s American disillusionment His works are often accompanied by jarring or cryptic handwritten inscriptions that are frequently adapted from literature or mass media and serve as an ironic or elliptical counterpoint to his imagery. Over the course of his career, Pettibon has relentlessly questioned viewers’ assumptions about the American dream and modern life—just as Philip Guston did in his own time.
“My drawings are meant to suggest. […] They are not mere calligraphy; they suggest worlds and scenes and landscapes. I am not against reading, interpretation, or translation.” --- Sonic Truth: A Q&A With Raymond Pettibon, Modern Matter, 2020
“Of course, I grew up an American. I represent America in a sense, although I don’t endorse America. As a lot of Americans, we are immigrants. In my case, from Ireland and Estonia.” --- Hang One Of These On The Establishment And Let's See What They Say, Flaunt Magazine, 2019
After graduating in economics from UCLA in 1977, Raymond Pettibon devoted himself to art. In 1992, he was featured in the important exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. He joined David Zwirner Gallery in 1995, where he has held many solo shows.
He has had significant solo exhibitions at major institutions around the world, including the New Museum (New York), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Kunst Museum Winterthur (Switzerland), Garage Museum (Moscow), and Centre Pompidou (Paris). He has also participated in many biennials, including those in Venice, Istanbul, Liverpool, and several editions of the Whitney Biennial in New York.
His drawings are now part of the collections of major international museums such as MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Tate (UK), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and the Whitney Museum (New York).
