Raymond Pettibon (born Raymond Ginn in Tucson, Arizona, 1957) is recognized as one of most significant and peculiar US figurative artists, despite his outsider nature, maintained since the 80s, when he first emerged on the international art scene.
The “petit bon” (good little one) – as Raymond was called by his father – adopted this nickname as surname during the late 70s when he started playing with his brother Greg Ginn, the founder of the famous punk band Black Flag. At that time, Pettibon started creating ironic and irreverent drawings: ink and gouache on paper that mixed fiction literature and comic-like sketches, creating strong, often ambiguous, associations. The artist’s works, which initially appeared on T-shirts, stickers, skateboards, flyers, cover records and such – among which, the most notable was the distinctive four-bars logo designed for the Black Flag and, later on, the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1990 album “Goo” –, at the beginning spread mainly within underground culture, helping to define the punk aesthetics.
But besides curious drawings and scrawled aphorisms, Pettibon’s copious production includes paintings, collages, books, animation made from his drawings, live action films from his own scripts and fanzines, all works that deal with reading things from the world at large and collecting subject matter from media, television, books and music. The artist’s interests, that span from baseball to literature and surfing, inevitably meet the US popular everyday life and crime news section characters such as Gumby, Vavoom, Batman and Robin, Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, but also US presidents like Nixon or Reagan, almost always accompanied by his own or someone else’s puzzling words.
The long and unconventional career of Raymond Pettibon has never experienced setbacks and, after his umpteenth affirmation at Art Basel and the surfers retrospective at Venus Over Manhattan, the artist is now presenting his new works at the prestigious Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin: another good occasion to look closely at the artistic research of a great, always up-to-date author.
The exhibition runs until 31st July 2014.
