Pettibon’s Punk Epocha at BFAS

Raymond Pettibon’s (Season 2) Punk Epocha: 70 Drawings from the Eighties opens this Thursday at Blondeau Fine Art Services in Geneva. The solo exhibition runs through July 19 and includes numerous black and white works that incorporate cartoonish illustration, political satire, insightful absurdity, and preposterous predicaments that have come to define the artist’s ’signature style’.  Punk’d indeed.

2008 California Biennial

The Orange County Museum of Art recently announced the names of fifty artists selected to participate in the 2008 California Biennial (CB08). The Museum launched the California Biennial in 1984; it has since become a premier exhibition for emerging artists in the state. This year’s exhibition, for the first time, incorporates off-site projects with collaborating venues from Tijuana to Northern California. Off-site installations include projects by Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon, Karl Haendel, High Desert Test Sites, Walead Beshty, Jedediah Caesar, and Piero Golia. Read the complete artist roster here.

CB08 is guest-curated by Lauri Firstenberg, founder and director/curator of LAXART in Los Angeles. The exhibition opens to the public on October 26, 2008.

Berliner Salon: Don’t Miss Raymond Pettibon at CFA

Art:21 Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon’s solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts closes tomorrow, so make sure to stop by the gallery’s spacious new building directly across from Museum Insel. The large scale wall paintings, interspersed with drawings in the artist’s signature graphic style, make excellent use of CFA’s sprawling interior and are rendered in bold brush strokes that scream of reckless, youthful aggression, echoing the punk ethos that has always defined Pettibon’s aesthetic.

The exhibition’s press release summarizes Pettibon’s subject matter, stating, “surfers, baseball players, trains, Gumby, Superman, and Charles Manson all frequently appear in his drawings. Pettibon also often incorporates texts into his works, which he either writes himself or borrows from writers like Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, or even the Bible.” Images of sexual perversion, political puns, and institutional sacrilege comprise the smaller works on view, all criticizing with sharp and comic irony the current, reprehensible state of the United States. To see more images from the exhibition, click here. Schoenes Wochenende.

Berliner Salon: Aaron Rose curates “Passion for the Possible” at Circle Culture Gallery

Aaron Rose, the California-based curator/musician behind the now-infamous Beautiful Losers exhibition, which championed the work of subculture “street artists” like Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen (both Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2), has another genre-defying exhibition currently on view in Berlin at Circle Culture Gallery, the city’s preeminent commercial space for urban contemporary art. Entitled Passion for the Possible, this show presents a surprising facet of urban pop art (especially in conjunction with street art and all of its subversive implications), specifically the obsessive print-making efforts of Sister Corita, a one-time Catholic nun.

Actually, Sister Corita was more of a deviant than her sanctified vocation avowed and she ultimately left the church after being labeled “a guerilla with a paintbrush” (according to the press release). Her artistic practice is thus a fitting anachronism for Aaron Rose’s curatorial framework and general penchant for blurring boundaries between disparate cultures. The works on view, a combination of silkscreen prints, murals and sculpture incorporating “popular culture images such as archetypal American consumerist products…alongside spiritual texts, song lyrics and literary writings,” explicitly oppose the conformity typically associated with her brand of Catholicism’s hyper-conservative doctrine.

Sister Corita was predominately active in California during the 1960’s and 70’s. Her use of collective consumer imagery in mass-produced prints is noted in the press release as “the positive west-coast alternative to Warhol, possibly pre-dating him.” She left the Church in 1969, only to be diagnosed with cancer in the early 1970’s and given six months to live. She didn’t succumb to her illness for another seven years, but she nonetheless began an intense period of artistic production immediately following her diagnosis. Her work and her biography are both inspiring and inherently American (in relation to the bygone era that her work represents), bridging the divide between public service and self-expression, social responsibility and anti-institutional rebellion.

Passion for the Possible runs through May 30th. A monograph of works by Sister Corita, aka Corita Kent, entitled Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita, was recently published by Four Corners Books.

Pettibon and McGee at Riverside Art Museum

Two shows featuring Art:21 artists open simultaneously on March 30 at the Riverside Art Museum in California.

The Big Sad, a two-person show by Barry Mcgee (Season 1) and Clare Rojas, examines the way these two artists draw upon street culture and utilize found objects and urban scraps. Both Mcgee and Rojas have bodies of work that mix a variety of styles and traditions, from folk art to graffiti writing, and combine both the craft of handmade painting and contemporary ideas about installation.

Thank You for Staying is a show of drawings by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) during a performance at the Riverside Art Museum earlier in the year. During the performance, Pettibon made drawings which legendary Minuteman bassist Mike Watt played music. The drawings contain references to Watt’s career, his lyrics, and the way he played that night, also well as a variety of other sources.

Both shows will be up until May 17, and you can find more information about the them here.

Raymond Pettibon solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

Berlin-based Contemporary Fine Arts gallery is currently exhibiting the work of Art:21 Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon. No Title, 2008 includes a large wall drawing in addition to video and works on paper composed with ink, colored pencil, and watercolor.

Pettibon‚Äôs comic strip narratives address a wide variety of topics in both art and socio-politics, ranging from sexuality to film, sports, and U.S. foreign policy. His incisive critiques are rooted in the 1970s punk scene from which his art emerged, having produced numerous album covers for the label SST Records. Pettibon’s brother, Greg Ginn, was a founding member of the seminal band Black Flag.

The artist’s usage of text does not take an explanatory role, but rather deliberately confuses in its ambiguous and ironic mode of storytelling. Often incorporating humor, they represent Pettibon’s personal viewpoints that he has written himself or borrowed from the likes of Flaubert, Proust, and Faulkner. Other figures that frequently appear in his work are surfers, baseball players, Gumby, Superman, and Charles Manson.

Raymond Pettibon’s sixth solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts runs through April 26. For further information, please visit the gallery website.

And we’re back: Raymond Pettibon in NY Times Op-Ed pages

Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon follows up his June 21 and September 23 contributions to the New York Times Opinion pages with his December 21 drawing, The Seasons: Winter. See the full-size work here.

[via Walker blog]

Raymond Pettibon: Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture) at Zwirner

Raymond Pettibon’s seventh solo exhibition just opened at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. On display is a set of drawings, Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture), where the thematic scope has become increasingly topical compared to his previous works, addressing current political and social concerns, including American foreign policy and the war in Iraq. Pettibon was featured in Season Two, included in the current 52nd Venice Biennale, and in 2004, he received the Bucksbaum Award following his participation in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, Pettibon was closely associated with the record label SST Records and the punk rock band Black Flag, started by his brother Greg Ginn. Contributing work for album covers, concert flyers, and fanzines and producing photocopied books that the artist distributed himself, Pettibon was a pioneer of the do-it-yourself ethic and aesthetic, which came to characterize Southern California underground culture.

Pettibon continues to blur the boundaries of “high” and “low,” pulling freely from a myriad of sources that span the cultural spectrum. His obsessively worked drawings tackle aspects of art history, religion, sports, movies, music, and sexuality. And his early inspiration in comic books has allowed for the development of a remote rather than deeply personal drawing style.

Despite his strikingly varied subject matter, certain images have risen to canonical status within the artist’s body of work, such as surfers, baseball players, trains, Gumby, Superman, Vavoom, and Charles Manson. Known for his prolific output, Pettibon’s works often incorporate text borrowed from literature and other sources, as well as the artist’s own original writings. The diverse literary referents for his pen and ink drawings range from Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, pulp fiction, and the Bible. Considering text as vital to his process as the drawn image, Pettibon’s visual and textual pairings oscillate from the quirkily connected to the bafflingly enigmatic, always remaining emotionally and intellectually provocative.

Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture) is on view through October 20. Read more info here.