25 November 2009 – 09 January 2010
For his latest show with Sadie Coles HQ, Raymond Pettibon is exhibiting a series of new drawings together with a number of seminal pieces from the 1980s. Pettibon’s recent body of work shows his art at its most eclectic: comic book vignettes, art historical motifs and literary quotation conflate beguilingly into a multivalent artistic idiom, described by the critic Robert Storr as “ideas, echoes and impressions that well up and marble in the imagination”.[1]Threaded through with an oblique, elusive irony, Pettibon’s drawings veer between homage and critique in their reflection of American politics, culture and counter-culture from the 1960s onward.
Pettibon’s recent works display a newly ‘painterly’ quality. A number of them are predominantly monotone, with black brushstrokes flecked expressionistically across the page. Others abound with colour: the textured gouache and acrylic work No Title (As he enlarged) shows red curtains opening upon a swirling blue planet Earth; while in Not Title (We would then), a fountain of colour – at once psychedelic and sickly – spews outward alongside textual fragments that include Aldous Huxley’s account of taking mescaline. In many of the works, cartoon-style exclamatives streak across the page, echoing the stylised transcriptions of Lichtenstein and other Pop artists, and yet often spelling out unintelligible sounds suggestive of a primeval state anterior to language. The ‘howl’ is one of a number of recurrent motifs in Pettibon’s new work; the human heart also reappears here as a dense, delicately rendered mass of capillaries.
Pettibon’s black and white drawings from the 1980s evidence a sparing, linear style. The pronounced, starkly drawn expressions evoke comic strips – much of Pettibon’s work from this period indeed took the form of fanzines. Pieces of excised text float suggestively above or beneath the images, baldy suspended within the white of the page and suspended in meaning between a multiplicity of emotional registers and connotations.
From his earliest pieces drawing upon the Los Angeles punk rock scene, Pettibon’s art has been characterised by this kind of historical and stylistic dissonance. Pop-cultural influences intermingle with those of Goya and Blake; cartoonish exaggerations and conflicting perspectives are juxtaposed with subtle tonal variations; and the cacophony of transcribed and reformulated texts – high-brow and low-brow – confirm Pettibon’s meandering, panoramic historical perspective.
[1] Robert Storr, ‘“You Are What You Read”: Words and Pictures by Raymond Pettibon’, in Raymond Pettibon
(New York: Phaidon Press, 2001), p. 72.
12 Jan – 17 Feb 2007
“There is an affinity between what bebop musicians did when working with standards and my work: I’ve never hidden the fact that it can depend a loton precedence and improvising off of some text. It’s not particularly original, a lot of writers do the same thing. Bebop is one of those instances whereit was open to more exposure; rap would be the same situation: you have actual samples around here…I guess nowadays to sample anyone without their permission is risky. I’m open to anything potentially, and there’s more of a collage or editing nature to my work. That doesn’t make such work derivative or less individual. I would argue the counter.”
This is Raymond Pettibon’s third exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ. In recent years Pettibon has had solo shows at Kunsthalle Wien (2006), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005), MACBA, Barcelona (2002), and the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2001). His work has been included in numerous key museum shows, including, most recently, Los Angeles 1955-1985, Centre Georges Pompidou (2006), and Drawing from the Modern, 1975 – 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005). Raymond Pettibon lives and works in Los Angeles.
Raymond Pettibon in interview with Gerald Matt and ThomasMießgang in Raymond Pettibon (Kunsthalle Wien / Verlag fürmoderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2006), p 14 / 15
16 Dec 03 – 31 Jan 04
Rainer Maria Rilke
From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge [1910]
How small I must still have been I see from the fact that I was kneeling on the stool in order to be within convenient reach of the table on which I was drawing. It was an evening in winter, in our apartment in town, if I am not mistaken. The table stood in my room between the windows; there was no lamp in the room save that which threw its light on my papers and on Mademoiselle’s book; for Mademoiselle sat next me, her chair pushed back a little, and was reading. She was always far away when she read; I do not know that she was absorbed in her book. She could read for hours, but she seldom turned the leaves, and I had the impression that the pages became steadily fuller and fuller, as if by looking she added words to them, certain words that she needed and which were not there. So it seemed to me as I went on drawing. I was drawing slowly without any very decided intention, and when I stuck, I would survey the picture with my head bent a little to the right; in that position I always found out soonest what was lacking. There were officers on horseback, who were galloping to battle, or they were in the midst of the fray - which was far simpler, for in that case, almost all one needed to draw was the smoke that enveloped everything. Mother, it is true, always insists that they were islands I was painting - islands with large trees, and a château, and a stairway, and flowers on the bank that were supposed to be reflected in the water. But I think she is making that up, or this must have happened at a later time.
(text taken from Raymond Pettibon: A Reader , eds. Ann Temkin and Hamza Walker, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1998)