Raymond Pettibon

Featuring more than 700 drawings from the 1960s to the present, “A Pen of All Work” at the New Museum is the largest presentation of Raymond Pettibon’s work to date.

Raymond Pettibon
“Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work” at the New Museum is the largest presentation of Pettibon’s work to date, featuring more than 700 drawings from the 1960s to the present.  

 

For over thirty years, Pettibon has been chronicling the history, mythology and culture of America with a prodigious and distinctive voice. Through his drawings’ signature interplay between image and text, he moves between historical reflection, emotional longing, poetic wit, and strident critique. Since the late 1960s, he has produced thousands of drawings and energetic installations that have been executed in museums and galleries around the world. These works poignantly evoke the country’s shifting values across time, from the idealistic postwar period in which he was born to the collapse of the American counterculture in the ’70s and ’80s to the painful military and social conflicts of the present. Although Pettibon is unquestionably a pivotal figure of American art since the 1990s, he has never before  had a major museum survey exhibition in New York.

Raymond Pettibon
Raymond Pettibon, No Title (My purpose in life is to do this), 1987. Ink on paper. Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica
Curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Massimiliano Gioni and Edlis Neeson, the exhibition also includes a number of Pettibon’s early self-produced zines and artist’s books, as well as several videos made in collaboration with fellow artists and his musician friends. This unique collection of objects and distinctly immersive installation will provide insight into the mind of one of the most influential and visionary living American artists. 
From the beginning of his career, Pettibon has employed drawing and writing in tandem to connect radically distinctive cultural forms – from movies and literature to comics and TV – and pieces of narratives from throughout history and culture. His visual universe is populated by the ghosts of the last century of American history, including such disparate characters as Charles Manson, Gumby, Superman, and Ronald Reagan. Pettibon hints at familiar and forgotten narratives in his work, while using an expressive approach to colour, line, and gesture in order to provoke complex emotional states. Whether his work is addressing surfing, baseball, war, or family, or channelling the voices of John Ruskin, Henry James, or Allen Ginsberg, it manages to suggest both personal and universal perspectives on our shared cultural experience.

 

The exhibition will travel to the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, the Netherlands where it will be on view from June 1–October 30, 2017.


until 9 April 2017
Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery, New York
Curators: Gary Carrion-Murayari, Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson

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