Created in conjunction with his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Raymond Pettibon's new book draws on his decades of involvement with artist's books, zines, and other ephemeral visual media. This singular collection of new works makes his vision accessible to a wide audience. Pettibon's obsessively crafted monochromatic drawings pull freely from music, politics, religion, sex, sports, movies, and comic books. Recently his style has become more fluid and expansive, resulting in room-size wall drawings and installations, as in his work for the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His thematic range is increasingly topical, addressing current political concerns as well as the human impulse toward faith.

Raymond Pettibon

Arts & Photography

Pettibon, Raymond

Individual Artists

Whitney Museum of American Art

a limited edition by the punk rock illustrator Raymond Pettibon.

Thinking of You

Renaissance Society

In the summer of 2013, Raymond Pettibon took over one of David Zwirner’s gallery spaces in New York, transforming the high-ceilinged, garage-like white cube into his studio in order to prepare a show of drawings and collages within—and sometimes directly on—its walls. Titled To Wit, evoking the Middle English expression that has come to express a certain formality today and is defined as “namely,” or “that is to say,” the exhibition gave new meaning to the term “site specific,” featuring vibrant, gestural works Pettibon created in conversation with his surroundings that operated as a sort of archive, both product and record of his relationship to that space and time. Unified by their bold, vivid lines and unconventional framing, they feature allusions to a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from violence, humor, and sex to literature, youth, art history, and sports—embodying the artist’s signature mix of social and political commentary, diary entry, and automatic drawing. This publication, presenting large color plates of the works created over that summer by Pettibon, who also produced an original drawing for its sturdy cardboard cover, explores the intricate relationship between image and language that has long fascinated the artist. Just as the works in the exhibition existed at once as art and document, so too does the book itself have the hefty, physical presence of a work of art. Extensive installation views capture the dynamic combination of visual imagery and text that has come to characterize Pettibon’s practice, and a selection of gritty black-and-white photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s working process. Context is provided by Lucas Zwirner, who accompanied the artist throughout this period and contributed the book’s essay, “A Month with Raymond.” As Zwirner describes it, the show functioned “as an essayistic whole held together by imaginative leaps and subtle connections which Raymond has left unexplained and uninterpreted.” That perspective is rounded out in an interview with the artist by Kim Gordon, a visual artist and musician, who first encountered Pettibon’s work in the early 1980s in Los Angeles.

Raymond Pettibon: To Wit

History & Criticism

David Zwirner Books

“All this must be either surfed or painted”: This is the underlying sentiment behind Raymond Pettibon’s iconic works of surfers and waves in this quintessential volume dedicated to the motif.\nPettibon is known for his characteristically enigmatic aesthetic and sharply satirical critiques of American culture. Though drenched in cynicism, his work empathizes with the dizzying madness of our own humanity as it engages both so-called high and low culture. Perhaps most poetic among the many motifs present in Pettibon’s oeuvre is the surfer. In 1985, Pettibon began his series of surfers and waves––which he continues to work on to this day––popular for depicting a lone surfer silently carving “a line of beauty” along an impossibly large wave.\nThis book spotlights a selection of more than one hundred surfers from the series, from smaller monochromatic works on paper to colorful large-scale paintings applied directly to the wall. For Pettibon’s protagonist in these works, surfing exists apart from all else. Momentarily he achieves sublimity on the wave, distant yet synced with turbulent reality. We are forced to confront our own scale: small and feeble in the face of the power of nature, what is beyond our control. Pettibon’s lyrical writings on these painted surfaces—both his own and lines taken from literature—reference his own philosophies and the confusions of reality: he critiques and highlights the hypocrisies and vanities of the world he engages. To help navigate, the scholar Brian Lukacher explores art-historical antecedents in Pettibon’s work, particularly the seascapes of J. M. W. Turner, and Jamie Brisick, the writer and former professional surfer, examines the Southern California surf and music culture of Pettibon’s youth. Professional big wave surfers Emi Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore also describe the sensory experience of conquering the enormous waves depicted in Pettibon’s works.

Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves

Brisick, Jamie

Lukacher, Brian

Edited by Roberto Ohrt. Essays by Roberto Ohrt and Uwe Koch. 
For over twenty years, Raymond Pettibon's drawings have earned an international following for their fluid style and youthful, iconoclastic outlook. His work is acclaimed for its wit and erudite eccentricities, and reveals an affinity for a diverse group of authors, from Baudelaire to Henry James to Mickey Spillane, whose quotations abound in his drawings. This book is a catalogue raisonne of his artist books produced between 1978 and 1998, many of which are now extremely rare and highly collected in both the art world and underground music circles. Popularized by small, independent music labels and publishers like SST and Superflux, these booklets and zines were originally available only in very small print runs, edition sizes ranged from 30 to 150 copies, where Pettibon's rough yet cultivated style became synonymous with the late 70s and early 80s D.I.Y. aesthetic. Presenting over a hundred of Pettibon's publications, 32 printed in their entirety with two of these published for the first time, this very limited edition hardcover is a valuable look at the development of one of the most significant artists from the last quarter century. 
"Pettibon is as serious about the racing form as he is about Wallace Stevens, he watches surfing videos as closely as Pasolini. For all its apparent casualness, there is no more erudite body of work in American art today." Suzanne Ghez and Ann Temkin

Raymond Pettibon: The Books 1978-1998

Ohrt, Roberto

Koch, Uwe

Distributed Art Pub Inc

Limning a dizzying array of topics with his distinctive combinations of image and text, Raymond Pettibon has created a vocabulary of characters and symbols that reappear consistently if enigmatically across his oeuvre, ranging from baseball players, atomic bombs, and railway trains to the cartoon Gumby. But the most poetic and revealing of Pettibon’s symbols may be the surfer, the solitary longboarder challenging a massive wave. In his surfer works, viewers ride along with a counterculture existentialist hero who perhaps is the artist’s nearest proxy. This revised and expanded edition of Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985–2015, the first printing of which sold out almost immediately upon publication in 2014, features twenty additional works, as well as new color separations and jacket design. Nearly all the works included in this volume depict an ocean roiling with chaotic swells, accompanied by non sequiturs, quotations, and fragments of poetry in the artist’s handwriting. Organized chronologically, the publication traces Pettibon’s prolific output of his surfer series, from early small-scale monochrome India ink drawings to numerous examples from the 1990s when the artist introduced color, culminating with his recent large-scale works, some of which were executed directly on a wall. Rounding out the publication is a poetic meditation by the writer Carlo McCormick, which captures the essence of Pettibon’s surfing works: “Riddled with enigma, Raymond Pettibon’s art speaks little about himself the artist, preferring rather to address more central questions on the nature of self, but he tells us this, ‘Some things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn at all, but only surfed,’ or again, ‘All this must be either surfed or painted.’ ”

Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015

Philosophically profound, deeply literary and biting in his satire, Raymond Pettibon is the foremost draftsman of his generation, and one of America’s most important contemporary artists. Approaching “high” and “low” subject matter with equal appetite and comfort, Pettibon plumbs the depths of American sexuality, politics, subcultures, mores, and intellectual histories through themes ranging from Shakespeare to Gumby, surfers to the Bible, baseball to German Romanticism. Published on the occasion of his major European traveling retrospective at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg – Sammlung Falckenberg, Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus presents over six hundred works from every part of the artist’s career, the majority of which have never been shown before. Arranged thematically in thirty-two chapters, this unique catalogue charts the appearance and development of the themes that have come to define Pettibon’s expansive oeuvre. Different sections are introduced with excerpts from interviews conducted with the artist, and are further discussed in a detailed appendix by curator Ulrich Loock. Beyond shedding valuable light on the genesis and cross-pollination of Pettibon’s thematic interests, this catalogue is the first to tackle the artist’s work as a whole—as a kind of hive mind of American culture whose various branches constantly address and reinterpret one another. Of particular interest are Pettibon’s own readings of individual works in the book. In excerpts paired with corresponding images, Pettibon guides readers through his complex, often meandering turns of thought; never condescending, they invite readers to enter more deeply into his thinking without sacrificing the intellectual rigor and sense of mystery that makes Pettibon’s work so compelling and challenging. The book includes a complete facsimile of his first artists’ book, Captive Chains—almost entirely unavailable for decades—in addition to numerous early drawings completed with his nephew, record covers, flyers, and sections dedicated to collages and drawings from the 1980s to today. Also featured are biographical notes compiled by Lucas Zwirner, offering a nuanced, insightful reading of Pettibon’s history, whose early life and work is often simplified and categorically tied to punk rock, and instead underscores the complexities surrounding the artist’s long-standing relationship with art, literature, and American culture. This unparalleled selection of Pettibon’s work is the definitive single volume for novices and experts alike.

Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus

One hundred thirty-six drawings and paintings of Raymond Pettibon, one of the most famous and interesting artists in North America. Pettibon's drawings pitilessly critique contemporary culture, using the aesthetic traditions of comic, pop-art and popular culture. His primary theme is the failure of the 1960s subculture to resist authority and shake up the world. The philosophy behind Pettibon’s work is that the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson cult and the Altamont killing mark the collapse of the highflying hopes and demands of the generation of 1968. His work, full of frightening images, speaks openly of the continuing despair and disgust of a generation. Pettibon is a striking example of an underground artist who now represents of so-called high culture.

Raymond Pettibon: The Pages Which Contain Truth Are Blank

Beatrice, Luca

Hapkemeyer, Andreas

Literature & Fiction

Skarabaeus

Is Las Vegas, the capital of the Western entertainment complex, also set to become the capital of art? A large number of artists live there or visit often, Venice was partially reconstructed there, and the Bellagio resort and casino house an art collection that includes El Grecos and Picassos promoted as if they were Frank Sinatra or the Beach Boys. At this historic moment, art is losing the visionary power to which it used to lay claim and is instead drawing closer to the forms of the entertainment industry, from lifestyle and game shows to Hollywood cinema and music videos. In a paradoxical turn of events, the society of the spectacle has become a reality and Las Vegas is becoming the capital of the future culture industry. Dave Hickey and art historian Libby Lumpkin moved to Las Vegas in the early 90s. For Hickey, the Strip has served as a platform for his critique of the elitist and purist structure of values within the art world. In 1992, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour published Learning from Las Vegas, providing a seminal and radical reevaluation of the vernacular architecture of what was then one of America's most culturally neglected cities.

Magic Hour, The: The Convergence of Art and Las Vegas

Reed, David

Hickey, Dave

DUCHAMP, MARCEL

Batchelor, David

Shaw, Jim

Carson, Karen

LIberace

Isermann, Jim

Vallance, Jeffrey

Acres, Reverend Ethan

Lumpkin, Libby

Argent, Philip

Bavington, Tim

Callister, Jane

Chen, E.

Hilton, Jane

Otto-Knapp, Silke

Reynolds, Victoria

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Notwithstanding their considerable differences and individuality--one would hardly expect them to have a lover in common--Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy and Raymond Pettibon share an artistic intent to explore eroticism and sexuality. Each artist deals, in his or her own stylistic way, with the intense physical states of ecstasy, passion, conflict and fear. Working through the medium of drawing--the "medium of the mind"--they trace themselves, scribing pictorial metaphors of an alternately tender, aggressive, attached, forceful and even erotic confrontation with the material. Creativity, itself never free from conflict, undresses itself in drawings that touch on obsession, desire and the pleasures of eroticism. (In Search of) The Perfect Lover groups together extensive works on paper from the Hauser and Wirth Collections, complemented by a selection of sculptures. Accompanying texts embrace the connections between body, eroticism, sexuality and creativity, as well as the potential conflicts embedded in each artist's work.

(In Search of) the Perfect Lover: Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon

Dumas, Marlene

McCarthy, Paul

BOURGEOIS, Louise

Unterdörfer, Michaela

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