Raymond Pettibon. The Cloud of Misreading

About

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 more than three 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 will feature 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.

Garage will publish a booklet specially for this show with the translations of texts that constitute the essential part of the artist’s works. Poet, translator, and musician Kirill Medvedev will become the Russian voice of Raymond Pettibon.

The Cloud of Misreading has been organized by the New Museum, New York, in collaboration with Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow.

Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957, Tucson, Arizona) currently lives and works in New York. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1977. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Renaissance Society, Chicago (1998); the Drawing Center, New York (1999); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1999); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2002); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2003); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2006); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012); Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn, Estonia (2015); Deichtorhallen Hamburg – Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (2016); and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2016). Pettibon has also participated in a number of important group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1993, 1997, and 2004), the Venice Biennale (1997 and 2003), Documenta XI (2002), and SITE Santa Fe (2004 and 2010).

Massimiliano Gioni

Massimiliano Gioni is the Edlis Neeson Artistic Director of the New Museum. In 2013, he was director of the Venice Biennale. He has curated numerous international exhibitions, including Manifesta 5 (2004), the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006), and the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2010).

Gary Carrion-Murayari

Gary Carrion-Murayari is the Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum. He was co-curator of the 2010 Whitney Biennial; The Equilibrists at the Benaki Museum, Athens (2016), and many exhibitions at the New Museum over the past six years. He is currently organizing the next New Museum Triennial, which will open in 2018.