FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Regen Projects
629 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424
Fax. (310) 276-7430
RAYMOND PETTIBON
September 8 – October 14, 2000
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11-5 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, September 8th, 6-8 pm
Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Raymond Pettibon. One of the most influential artists to emerge from southern California, Pettibon's drawings encompass the spectrum of American culture from the deviancies of marginal youth-culture to art, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Pettibon has gained international recognition for his drawings which uniquely combine the drawn image and text, both borrowed passages from literature and texts written by Pettibon himself. This exhibition will feature new works on paper and large wall drawings painted directly on the walls of the gallery.
“…Pettibon’s iconography shifts from the intimate pathology of private life to its corresponding configurations in the pathological public sphere: the figures imposed for mass-cultural or political identification.…But in all instances in which the social and ideological configurations of a pathological public sphere manifest themselves in Pettibon’s work … a deep ambivalence in the narrative and the depiction prevents us from a simple cathartic distantiation of circumstances from which we have been fortunately protected. We are attending neither a moralist’s didactic account nor a therapeutic drawing session, for Pettibon’s realism is not that of Bertolt Brecht, in which disidentification is tantamount to seeing an alternate conception of social relations and subject formation. Pettibon’s ambivilances derive rather from an identificatory realism (such as Jean Genet’s) in the sense that each textual citation and each figurative presentation contains at least an index or an icon that considers depravity as a shared, if not as the last, condition of resistance.”
(Benjamin Buchloh. Raymond Pettibon: A Reader. P. 232)
“Pettibon’s drawings are episodic meditations on the slipperiness of life. They speak with the rare sensibility of a nominal outsider who has reached that place by going so deep inside the culture that he’s disappeared within the mass…Part aimless rant and part open-ended visual poem, Pettibon’s work is suffused with an inescapable poignancy. Pettibon’s art … forms an obsessive, fragmented, relentless stream of consciousness, which poetically pictures the nature of thought in a glutted Information Age. As the torrent rages on, the artist treads water with his eyes wide open, keeping his head (and ours) just above the overwhelming deluge.”
(Christopher Knight. The Los Angeles Times. October 11, 1999.)
Born in 1957, Pettibon lives and works in Hermosa Beach, California. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the United States. Monographs of Pettibon’s work include: Raymond Pettibon: A Reader published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Renaissance Society in Chicago; Thinking of You also published by The Renaissance Society in Chicago; and Raymond Pettibon published by the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. Other upcoming publications include a monograph by Phaidon Press, Inc. and a book bringing together a comprehensive collection of Pettibon’s zines published by Octagon Press.
The opening reception for Raymond Pettibon will take place on Friday, September 8th from 6 to 8 pm at Regen Projects. For further information please contact Shaun Caley Regen or Lisa Overduin at the gallery at 310/276-5424.