Raymond Pettibon

Biography

Raymond Pettibon's highly idiosyncratic pen and ink drawings have taken him from L.A. cult status to the international artworld. With their quirky fragments of handwritten text and cartoon-like imagery, which quote sources as diverse as underground comics and 19th-century literature, Pettibon's work juxtaposes an aggressive rawness with an oddly poetic, even metaphysical, sensibility. With Mike Kelley, Pettibon was close to the West Coast punk bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s. His deliberately crude, low-tech video narratives are irreverent tales of 1960s and '70s West Coast radical subcultures, from Patty Hearst and the Manson family to the Los Angeles punk rock scene. These wildly ironic, deadpan dramas feature an ensemble of luminaries from L.A.'s post-punk underground.

Raymond Pettibon was born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1991 he received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, and in 2010 was awarded the Oscar Kokoschka Prize. Pettibon's work has been shown at the Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in exhibitions at the Kunstverein Dusseldorf; Louisiana Museum, Humlebael, Denmark; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. One-person exhibitions include the Kunsthalle, Bern; Tramway, Glasgow; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is represented in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Pettibon lives in Hermosa Beach, California.