Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon is a contemporary American artist whose frugal yet poetic drawings mine the history and mythology of the US.

Part world-weary cynic, part savant, he plumbs both that nation’s cultural archetypes — surfers, baseball players and the like — and specific figures including Charles Manson, Joan Crawford, the cartoon character Gumby and Richard Nixon.

Above or below his drawings are scrawled texts — chiefly quotations (or deliberate misquotations) from classic authors such as St Augustine, Marcel Proust and Mickey Spillane, but also from mass media and graffiti — that are not often connected with the picture in any obvious, logical way.

Born Raymond Ginn in Tucson, Arizona, in 1957, Pettibon grew up in Hermosa Beach, a popular surfing spot near Los Angeles. While studying economics at UCLA, he began making political cartoons and turned a nickname given him by his father — Petit Bon or ‘good little one’ — into his nom de plume.

While teaching maths at a junior high school, Pettibon’s cartoons developed into drawings and album cover and flyer artwork for bands such as Sonic Youth and Black Flag.

In 1978, Pettibon started to turn photocopied compilations of his cartoons and drawings into zines that he sold in local comic-book and record stores. Captive Chains — a mix of film noir, soft porn and newspaper images – is among the most well-known and today prized by collectors.

In 1985, Pettibon began a now iconic series of drawings depicting lone surfers gliding impossibly blue, impossibly large waves. These were ‘about nature at its most epic, its most ferocious,’ he has said, ‘what you call the sublime.’ In 2013, No Title (The Lower Half…) set a record price for the artist when it was sold at Christie’s New York for $1.58 million. In 2022, Pettibon published a book of his surf pictures, Point Break, with David Zwirner, the gallery he joined in 1995.

Pettibon’s first major solo exhibition in New York — A Pen of All Work — was held at the New Museum in 2017. A vast showing of more than 700 drawings, it travelled to Maastricht and, in a smaller iteration, Moscow.

In 2019, drawings including No Title (She Must Know) and No Title (Take It From . . . ) (both 2010) were incorporated into Dior menswear, for artistic director Kim Jones’s winter 2019–20 show.

Pettibon has also exhibited at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1998). His work is held by institutions including the Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and Tate, London.