FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Regen Projects
633 North Almont Dr.
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424
Fax. (310) 276-7430
RAYMOND PETTIBON
September 13 - October 24, 2003
Gallery Hours : Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13th, 6-8pm
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 deviances 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 text written by Pettibon himself.
Pettibon is the exemplary artist of the morning after, the picture-making poet of disasters that stalk abandon who nevertheless wants more than anything to disappear into his imagination. He’s the man of our doubting, marvel-deprived hour. . . Pettibon is the rarest sort of contemporary artist: a seeker. The aggregate of his drawings and texts is a kind of armchair odyssey without a preconceived destination. Intuition guides the traveler, and cryptic messages or transfiguring glimpses of talismanic objects and otherworldly wonders lead him on--books, crosses, totemic statues, mesmerizing lights, sublime landscapes, divine visitations . . . the journey is devoted to the wickedness and woe of this world, and when it comes to irredeemable nastiness, Pettibon is an expert. Mixing black humour with chilling pessimism, stock characters out of the 1940’s and 50’s melodrama with first-hand observations of the 60’s 70’s and 80’s hustlers and dead beats, Pettibon has served up an original mythic version of an infernal America that has the creepy ring of truth.
(Robert Storr. Raymond Pettibon, published by Phaidon. pg. 71)
[Pettibon] has kept tapping a small, rich, private vein of psychic and visual possibility, still not exhausted, deepening incrementally. Call it a rut if you want. I say his obsessiveness and logorrhea are part and parcel of the work’s merit . . . Their effect, as usual with Mr. Pettibon, is less one drawing at a time than cumulative, like waves on the shore, which are hypnotic and deceptively potent. The ocean is his continuing imagination on which he invites us to sail toward oblivion.
(Michael Kimmelman. The New York Times. January 31, 2003.)
Born in 1957, Pettibon lives and works in the South Bay, outside of Los Angeles, California. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. Several monographs of Pettibon’s work have been published since 1995.
The opening reception for Raymond Pettibon will take place on Saturday, September 13th from 6 to 8pm. For further information please contact Shaun Caley Regen or Lisa Overduin at the gallery at (310) 276-5424.
