Raymond Pettibon

The Drawing Center's retrospective of over two decades of work by Los Angeles-based artist Raymond Pettibon (born 1957) featured over 500 drawings, as well as a selection of artist's books, fanzines, and record covers. Pettibon is perhaps the most prominent contemporary American artist to concentrate on drawing as his primary medium. To his early admirers and collectors, he was the in-house artist of the punk music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the creator of photocopied booklets that he sold for one or two dollars. Today his work is widely admired among the contemporary art audience and has avid devotees in the international field of drawing connoisseurs.

While Pettibon's style initially relied on the conventions of cartoon illustration, over the years he developed an entirely personal approach to art-making, characterized by a uniquely sophisticated relationship between image and text. Pettibon's visual sources are numerous and varied—his eclectic iconography includes Gumby, surfers, trains, dollar signs, and American heroes and antiheroes such as Ronald Reagan, Elvis Presley, and Joan Crawford. His literary sources are equally wide ranging, from James Joyce, William Blake, and John Ruskin to Charles Manson, pulp fiction, and the Bible. Although Pettibon is a gifted draftsman, he frequently displays a marked disregard for skill in favor of an aesthetic of rapid execution and urgency.