Description: Since the late 1970s, as a pioneer of Southern California underground culture, Raymond Pettibon has blurred the boundaries of "high" and "low," from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics and sexuality. Rich in detail, his obsessively worked drawings pull freely from myriad sources spanning the cultural spectrum. The resulting, highly poetic constructions function as acute reflections of contemporary society. Throughout the years, his subjects have included political figures and historical events, with particular intensity since the events of September 11, 2001. Seen here are images of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, both Bush presidents, the Kennedys, Hitler, scenes from the Vietnam War and protest movements, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prisoner abuse of Abu Ghraib, President Obama and Osama bin Laden. Raymond Pettibon (born 1957) studied economics at UCLA around the same time he joined his brother in the punk band Black Flag. He soon began to contribute artwork to album covers, flyers and t-shirts, for the band and its label, SST Records, and exhibited his work in group shows in galleries in the 1980s. Since the 1990s his work has been the subject of numerous major solo exhibitions.
Review Quotes: RAYMOND PETTIBON: HERE'S YOUR IRONY BACK, POLITICAL WORKS 1975-2013 is superior in its design and reproduction, on uncoated paper stock appropriate to the art, but is also unavoidably reductive. A glance at the dates of Pettibon's notionally topical drawings shows that his targets are often long past their sell-by dates as subjects for satire-like his early-'80s works sending up hippies and Vietnam protesters. He has a larger goal: to create a commedia dell'America whose stock characters, such as the Artist (Krazy Kat), the Politician (Reagan), the Movie Queen (Joan Crawford), and the Villain (Manson), pitilessly reflects the broken culture that produced them.--Christopher Lyon "Bookforum"