Leslie Sacks Contemporary is proud to announce an exhibition of prints by Los Angeles artist Raymond Pettibon. The exhibition will feature Plots on Loan I, 2000, a suite of 10 lithographs co-published by Brooke Alexander Editions, Inc., and David Zwirner, New York. The exhibition will also include rarely exhibited lithographs from renowned Los Angeles atelier Hamilton Press. These prints often include unique elements: unique text or hand-painted watercolor.
Coming off of two acclaimed drawing exhibitions in 2011, Raymond Pettibon is fast becoming one of the most recognizable artists hailing from Los Angeles today. He is known for his graphic, comic-book style drawings of surfers, trains, cars, noir figures and baseball players, which are almost always paired with quotes from classic Western literature. Pettibon’s work comments on a range of topics covering nearly every aspect of American culture, from philosophy to politics to the punk scene in 1980s Southern California. Particular images, historical figures and classic archetypes get revisited again and again by the artist in new and complex ways. Pettibon’s wide array of subject matter and some of his most classic images can be seen throughout the Plots on Loan I suite, such as the surfer riding a giant wave in Untitled (Above the Fogs...).
Pettibon names Edward Hopper, pulp comics and Goya engravings as influences for his illustrative style. His meticulously worked drawings lend themselves particularly well to the printmaking process, which captures the work’s linear variations and intricacies.
Impressively well read, Pettibon looks to William Blake’s combination of imagery and text as an artistic predecessor. In Pettibon’s work, borrowed literary phrases are at times employed as narrative and in other instances used for satire. The quotes he pulls may be reproduced in full, but more often the text is twisted or expanded upon with the artist’s own additional writings. Viewed together, Pettibon’s drawings and phrases may become philosophical musings or sardonic commentaries as the text is given new meaning through its pairing with the image, or vice versa. There is often a ambiguity to Pettibon’s work that makes multiple interpretations possible.
Raymond Pettibon’s work is held in a large number of major permanent collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Tate Gallery, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.