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“...Pettibon gives us the full sweep of the American social landscape. Then he detonates it. Compounding his images — urgent, bold, often hallucinatory — are headlong inscriptions that mix original writing and material borrowed from authors spanning centuries.”
Extracting references as wide-reaching as Walt Whitman to Punk music and Honoré Daumier to California surf culture, Raymond Pettibon crafts a refined and idiosyncratic visual lexicon which simultaneously conveys angst and ferocity in tandem with axiom and humor. Coming of age in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Pettibon began his career creating concert flyers and album covers, most notably Pettibon’s brother’s band, Black Flag, and later the Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth. Pettibon’s oeuvre culls from contemporary society and history, crafting a masterful and witty visual panoply—at times quoting directly and at others inventing text and image for his compositions. His vigorous articulation evokes the audacious hand of Cy Twombly while his semantics call to mind the work of Christopher Wool or Richard Prince. Adamantly self-taught, Pettibon intermingles text and image in his radical visual language but pays homage to the acerbic caricatures and social jest of the likes of Daumier and William Hogarth.

This superb suite of Pettibon’s celebrated works on paper encapsulates the range of his visual vernacular and showcases Barbara Gladstone’s incomparable curatorial eye. Hung together in dialogue, this jewel-like grouping provides undying dialogue and visual play. Anchored by the artist’s most iconic subject, the intrepid surfer, the surrounding constellation of drawings showcases the breadth of Pettibon’s caricatured world. The surfer propels himself away from a mammoth crashing wave—the text above him reads: Is it not strange that we should wander by this shore talking of Homer, forgetful of ourselves? Pettibon’s anonymous thrill seeker, seemingly riding an impressive wave with ease, represents a conquest of man over nature or, if one considers surfing as a countercultural enterprise, a victory for the individual over society. Another work in the suite is a poignant self-portrait: the artist depicts himself with a furrowed brow and plump tears trickling from his eyes. Above his visage, Pettibon includes the text: The picture-maker makes itself humble in order to be forgiven. Another work features a majestic red tulip before a black halo, alongside text reading: Selecting and arranging them. Hunters and collectors. A surfer, a self-portrait, a question mark, a smoke plume, a detective, a gun, and a red tulip comprise this exceptional vignette. Pettibon’s compositions capture fleeting moments with graphic force and quiet mysticism—harnessing the instant before a crashing wave, the descent of a tear, and the rising of smoke. This group masterfully encapsulates Pettibon’s fascinating ability to blend the existential with the quotidian and beauty with fear, allure with terror.