Following its tradition of introducing internationally renowned artists to a local audience, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first solo exhibition of Raymond Pettibon in Russia.
A major part of the Garage summer exhibition season, the show—curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari from the New Museum in New York—brings together around four hundred works, including ephemera and materials from the personal archive of a figure who has been key to the American art scene since the 1990s.
Pettibon first received attention for his work when it was used in fliers, zines, and record covers in the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene of the 1980s. His work became identified with a brash and iconoclastic visual style that would influence and speak to generations of disaffected youth. In spite of this impact, Pettibon’s link to the punk scene has obscured the scope of his thematic and stylistic vision and the important place he occupies in the history of contemporary art. He stands alongside a generation of Los Angeles artists who have tackled the dissolution of American idealism head-on, using fragments of its own visual culture.
This presentation demonstrates the gradual evolution of the use of language in Pettibon’s work from the strident captions of his early drawings to the poetic, self-reflexive tone he has adopted in the past two decades. Beginning in the 1990s, Pettibon began borrowing and adapting bits of text from his favorite authors—Henry James, John Ruskin, and Marcel Proust—who haunted his work and transformed his images with surprising and enigmatic juxtapositions. In addition to hundreds of drawings from throughout his career, this exhibition features never-before-exhibited fragments of text from Pettibon’s constantly growing collection of source material, offering rare insight into his artistic process and singular mind.
The Cloud of Misreading show brings together around four hundred works, including ephemera and materials from the personal archive of the artist. Most of them are drawings with fragments of text. Garage has published a booklet specially for the Raymond Pettibon show with translations of the texts that constitute the essential part of the artist’s works. Poet, translator, and musician Kirill Medvedev has become the Russian voice of Raymond Pettibon. You can find the printed version at the exhibition space and download the electronic version below.
18+
The Cloud of Misreading has been organized by the New Museum, New York, in collaboration with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow.
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari. The project at Garage is organized with Garage curator Katya Inozemtseva.
