Raymond Pettibon. Underground

Alongside the exhibition Philip Guston. The Irony of History, the Musée national Picasso-Paris is devoting an exhibition to American artist Raymond Pettibon, with the support of David Zwirner Gallery. Through seventy drawings and around ten fanzines, the exhibition, spanning five decades, explores the ironic and unsettling universe of this major contemporary artist.

A self-taught artist born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, Raymond Pettibon emerged in the late 1970s, designing album covers and ephemera for the punk rock band Black Flag, formed in Hermosa Beach, California. He also began exhibiting and self-publishing his early drawings, zines, and artist's books, which incorporated the DIY aesthetic of underground comics, flyers, and fanzines characteristic of the subculture at the time. 

Pettibon began exhibiting widely in the 1990s. Since that time he has gained widespread recognition for work that draws from a wide range of sources, including literature, art history, popular culture, religion, politics, and sposrts. Resolutely anti-authoritarian, Pettibon's biting depictions of hippies, surfers, baseball players, politicians, superheroes, and cartoon characters - among other subjects - paint a caustic portrait of post-1960s American disillusionment. His works are often accompanied by jarring or cryptic handwritten inscriptions that are frequently adapted from literature or mass media and serve as an ironic or eliptical counterpoint to his imagery. Over the course of his career, Pettibon has relentlessly questioned viewers' assumptions about the American dream and modern life - just as Philip Guston did in his own time.