Raymond Pettibon
Raymond Pettibon was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1957. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, Pettibon studied economics but soon after graduating, decided to become a professional artist. In his early career, Pettibon was a member of the California punk rock scene, producing illustrations and graphic work for bands and magazines. Over time, his artistic practice evolved, with drawing as his primary discipline. In his drawings and animated works, Pettibon combines language and visual imagery in an ambiguously suggestive manner, as if recording remnants of narratives and half-formed thoughts.
Solo exhibitions of his work have been shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany. Pettibon also participated in Documenta XI in 2002.
The Dissolve
A paradigm shift in contemporary art is rare and hard to recognize at its inception, but that is what curators Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco did in The Dissolve, SITE SANTA FE’s Eighth International Biennial. The curators presented a new sensibility in the art of our time, a mingling of up-to-the-minute technology and traditional visual arts (painting, drawing, and sculpture) with dance, music, and film. The fundamental form of this new work was animation, uniting the technological (the camera) with the handmade (drawing).
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Disparities and Deformations
Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque brought together a diverse group of contemporary artworks that respond and give new substance to the sense of emotional and logical uncertainty inherent in the grotesque, described by the 19th-century writer Jean Paul as a state of “soul dizziness.” The exhibition tracked the incongruous combination of disparate forms and ideas in the work of internationally renowned artists of different generations, coming from various cultural contexts, and working with different processes and ideas.
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