Raymond Pettibon: V-Boom

Raymond Pettibon is one of the most distinctive and highly regarded American artists of his generation. In the thousands of drawings he has produced over the last two decades, Pettibon stakes out a thematic territory that combines the bright, shiny world of American mass culture with its darkly complex undertows. Pettibon's imagery largely derives from the world of cartoons and popular culture: surfers, trains, baseball players, and cartoon characters. His prolific skill lies in his ability to make powerful and poetic associations between word and image. An avid reader, he isolates a phrase or word and inserts it into his drawing, not as a commentary but as an active graphic element, often written in capitals like a caption to the image. His works range in tone from the polemical to the confessional and introspective and explore the extremes of the human condition from the abject to the sublime.

Pettibon's work was originally produced for the attention of his friends-fellow artists and musicians in the punk scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s and early 1980s. At that time he combined painting, songwriting, performing, and video making for bands like Sonic Youth, Minutemen, and Black Flag.

Today his works are included in the permanent collections of public galleries throughout the world, and have been shown in many solo exhibitions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.