Raymond Pettibon - Cooper Dennis

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Résumé :
In the Interview, poet and novelist Dennis Cooper speaks with the artist about recurring his interests, among them baseball, literature and surfers. Curator Robert Storr discusses in his Survey the full scope of Pettibon's prolific career, examining the context of 1960s-80s California culture and the work's rich variety of visual and textual references. Ulrich Loock, who curated Pettibon's first retrospective in 1995, looks at a single image from Pettibon's oeuvre, a drawing of the loudmouth cartoon character Vavoom. The artist has selected extracts from Modern Painters (1843-60) by John Ruskin. The Life and Opinion of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) by Laurence Sterne. and a poem from The Arte of English Poesie (1589), attributed to George Puttenham, all of which echo the artist's use of text and image to form a complete whole. Raymond Pettibon's writings include early poetry. pages from his notebooks. and never-before-published song lyrics and scripts on subjects ranging from Jim Morrison to Hollywood seduction.

Biographie:
Raymond Pettibon is recognized as one of America's most important representational artists. Emerging on the international art scene in the 1980s, Pettibon is best known for his extraordinary output of inkwash drawings and their signature combination of figurative images and short, enigmatic texts. Pettibon first began making such drawings in the late 1970s to adorn the record covers of underground music groups like Black Flag and Sonic Youth. since then his work has also included painting, collage, artist's books, videos and fanzines. The subject matter in his drawings - at times dashed off in comic book style, in other instances painstakingly rendered - is culled from the printed pages of American popular and underground culture: surfing, film noir, Patty Hearst, Gumby, Charles Manson. Framed or pinned directly on the wall like a scattered notebook, the drawings always include texts - sometimes weirdly connected to the imagery but often providing baffling non-sequiturs. Pettibon's many international exhibitions include his first major retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern (1995). In 1998-2000 a touring exhibition of his work traveled to The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. the Drawing Center, New York. the Philadelphia Museum of Art. and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.