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)