Raymond Pettibon was born
in Tucson, Arizona in 1957. The fourth of five children, Pettibon
earned a degree in Economics from the University of California,
Los Angeles. After graduating from college, Pettibon worked briefly
as a high-school math teacher, but soon after set out to launch
a career as a professional artist. A cult figure among underground
music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles
punk
rock scene, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as
one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing,
text, and artist’s books. Pettibon is as likely to explore
the subject of surfing as he is typography; themes from art history
and nineteenth-century literature appear in the same breath with
American politics from the 1960s and contemporary pop
culture.
In his 1998 anthology, “Raymond Pettibon: A Reader,” the
viewer can read over Pettibon’s shoulder to discover a handful
of the artist’s muses—Henry James, Mickey Spillane, Marcel
Proust, William Blake, and Samuel Beckett, among others. In the
1990s, Pettibon extended his work beyond the printed page and onto
the walls of the exhibition space, creating wall-sized drawings
and
collages.
Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles. In 2002, an exhibition of his drawings, Plots
Laid Thick, was organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de
Barcelona, Spain, and traveled to the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery,
and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands. Pettibon’s
work was also featured at Documenta XI in Kassell, Germany. Pettibon
lives and works in Hermosa Beach, California.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
David Zwirner Gallery, New York | Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Raymond Pettibon on the Art21 blog |
