Raymond Pettibon

23. 6.–2. 10. 2005

International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC)

Raymond Pettibon, drawings from Dorothy Zwirner's collection (left and behind) and LP covers from Radio Študent's music library (right), 26th Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana, 2005, installation view of the exhibition of the Prize Winner at MGLC.

Photo: Tomaž Lunder. MGLC Archive.

A contemporary American artist Raymond Pettibon was awarded the Grand Prize of Honor at the 25th International Biennial of Graphic Arts (2003) for his work Plots on Loan, a book of lithographs and texts. Thus he joined a prestigious group of Grand Prize winners, who as a result were given the opportunity to present an independent exhibition at the Biennial (as did Damien Hirst in 2003, Richard Hamilton in 2001, and so on).

Raymond Pettibon (1957) works with drawing, text, and the design of artist books. He likes to retreat into history and, at a distance, revive key figures, primarily from the American cultural and political landscape of the 1950s and 1960s.

More than fifty drawings were presented in the exhibition at the International Centre of Graphic Arts, in which the artist focused on the importance of the relationship between text and image in his work. He works in both writing and drawing and through the combination of text and image, which derives from the language of comic books, he creates a unique hybrid, a hodgepodge of quotations lifted from various contexts, which he then inserts into a new story. In his work we detect the memories, approximate quotations, feelings, ideas, and pictures that have come to him in his reading of a variety of authors, from contemporary literature to St. Augustine and the Bible. Pettibon sees all books as part of a single great book from which he can draw his ideas. The exhibition presented works from a private collection and the covers of gramophone records from the record library of Radio Študent.

Curator: Božidar Zrinski.