Raymond Pettibon’s drawings subtly resemble Philip Guston’s late paintings, although the two are associated with fundamentally different aesthetic and historic environments. Irina Kulik will discuss these parallels, as well as differences, in her next lecture.
Creator of the iconic Goo cover—an album by the New York band Sonic Youth—Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957) briefly taught mathematics in a Los Angeles public school, before receiving a degree in fine arts. His first works dating from the late 1970s were flyers, posters and T-shirt prints related to his elder brother’s punk band, as well as DIY zines. Over time, Pettibon’s India ink on paper drawings, often containing ironic inscriptions, became his signature style. Nowadays he is associated with subcultures and the underground. Referencing mass culture, and comic strips in particular, Pettibon’s graphic works may at the same time quote classic authors, from St. Augustin to Henry James. Many of them imply grotesque, alluding to William Hogarth’s satirical plots, or Goya’s etchings.
Philip Guston (1913–1980) is an American artist of the so-called New York School—a generation of abstract expressionists whose practice promoted the NYC to the status of the world’s art capital by the mid-twentieth century. Although Guston, like Jackson Pollock, Marc Rothko, Willem de Kooning and other contemporaries, worked a lot with abstraction, his more recognizable pieces were made in the later decades (1960s and 1970s). Those paintings, marked by return to figuration, are notable for their implicit sense of humor and are reminiscent of children’s drawings. Following the artist’s death in 1980, many of his works were acquired by the world’s leading museum collections, including MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Chicago Arts Institute and Tate Modern, London, among others.
