BOOK: The Raymond Pettibon Collection-David Zwirner Books

The “Raymond Pettibon Collection” by David Zwirner Books presents Pettibon’s potent and dynamic artistic commentary, ranging from punchy and political to high literary and extremely poetic. His artworks take points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s, and the do-it-yourself aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement. The collection is composed from three books.  In 1985, Raymond Pettibon began his iconic series of waves, popular for its frequent depiction of the lone surfer silently carving “a line of beauty” along an impossibly large wave. The book “Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves” 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. “Raymond Pettibon: To Wit” presenting large color plates of the works created over the summer of 2013 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. 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.-Dimitris Lempesis