Raymond Pettibon

(American, born 1957)

Raymond Pettibon is a contemporary American artist known for his stylized ink drawings combining images and text. His inventive narratives blend historical content with consumer culture to yield incisive critiques of contemporary society. “I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology,” he explained. “There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures.” Born Raymond Ginn on June 16, 1957 in Tucson, AZ, the artist is self-taught, but cites drawings by William Blake, Edward Hopper, Francisco Goya, and John Sloan as instructive to his practice. Deriving inspiration from comics, cartoons, and other pop culture iconography, Pettibon began designing album covers and ephemera for his brother’s band Black Flag in the mid-1970s. He went on to produce cover art for Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, and the Foo Fighters. In 2017, the artist was the subject of the major retrospective “Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work,” held at the New Museum in New York, where he currently lives and works. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.