Art:21 Season 2 artist Raymond Pettibon’s solo exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts closes tomorrow, so make sure to stop by the gallery’s spacious new building directly across from Museum Insel. The large scale wall paintings, interspersed with drawings in the artist’s signature graphic style, make excellent use of CFA’s sprawling interior and are rendered in bold brush strokes that scream of reckless, youthful aggression, echoing the punk ethos that has always defined Pettibon’s aesthetic.
The exhibition’s press release summarizes Pettibon’s subject matter, stating, “surfers, baseball players, trains, Gumby, Superman, and Charles Manson all frequently appear in his drawings. Pettibon also often incorporates texts into his works, which he either writes himself or borrows from writers like Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, or even the Bible.” Images of sexual perversion, political puns, and institutional sacrilege comprise the smaller works on view, all criticizing with sharp and comic irony the current, reprehensible state of the United States. To see more images from the exhibition, click here. Schoenes Wochenende.