Checking out one of my favourite artists

“We have to end the game with the lead”

– Recently hired New York Giants head coach Ben McAdoo on the team’s key to success for the 2016 season.

Saturday, February 20, 2016
Just a quick update about last weekend; Anyone who knows me would know that I’m a big fan of the ’80s punk band Black Flag. I’ve been a fan of theirs for years, not just of their music, but also the artwork on their albums and flyers.

The artist responsible was a man by the name of Raymond Pettibon, brother of the band’s guitarist, Greg Ginn. Besides designing the Black Flag logo and doing other artwork for the band, he has also done album covers for other bands and musicians I like, such as Sonic Youth, Off!, The Minutemen and Mike Watt. He’s even done the covers of a couple of Foo Fighters singles. So when I heard he had an exhibition here at the David Zwirner Gallery, we just had to go, even if it was on the last day.

For a little extra information about Raymond Pettibon, I’ll let Wikipedia fill you in

Raymond Pettibon (born Raymond Ginn on June 16, 1957) is an American artist who lives and works in New York City.

Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his brother Greg Ginn. He has since gone on to international acclaim, earning several awards and exhibiting in major galleries and museums.

Known for his comic-like drawings with disturbing, ironic or ambiguous text, Pettibon’s subject matter is sometimes violent and anti-authoritarian. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, he was closely associated with the punk rock band Black Flag and the record label SST Records, both founded by his older brother Greg Ginn. In addition, Pettibon has designed the cover of the 1991 Sonic Youth album Goo; bassist Kim Gordon had been a longtime admirer of Pettibon’s art and written about him for Artforum in the 1980s. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he became a well-known figure in the contemporary art scene.

Pettibon works primarily with India ink on paper and many of his early drawings are black and white, although he sometimes introduces color through the use of pencil, watercolor, collage, gouache or acrylic paint. Pettibon’s drawings encompass the spectrum of American culture from the deviances of marginal youth-culture to art, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Motifs include Charles Manson, surfers, baseball players, vixens, homicidal teenage punks, Elvis Presley, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and the cartoon figure Gumby. Pettibon’s works on paper combine the drawn image and text, both borrowed passages from literature and text written by Pettibon himself. Some images appear alone, but most often they are paired with handwritten snippets of text, either the artist’s own, or quotations from Henry James, John Ruskin, Christopher Marlowe, William Faulkner, James Joyce, and others.

Pettibon has stated that his interest in this technique is a result of the influence of artists such as William Blake and Goya, and the style of political editorial cartoons. His drawings come out by the hundreds. He started to publish them as limited-edition photocopied booklets in 1978. These booklets, which he continues to produce as “Superflux Pubs,” are considered “the sum of his ideas and aesthetics”. Pettibon started working in collage in the mid-80s with simple newsprint elements collaged onto black and white images. In his new works, the artist again uses the means of collage.

Onto the exhibition:

Definitely a great day out.