Raymond Pettibon valuation
Punk's illustrator, whose ink drawings pair noir images with fragments of text, borrowed and invented.
Raymond Pettibon was born Raymond Ginn in Tucson, Arizona, in 1957, grew up in Hermosa Beach, California, and took a degree in economics at UCLA in 1977.
What a work by Raymond Pettibon is worth
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Bio
Raymond Pettibon was born Raymond Ginn in Tucson, Arizona, in 1957, grew up in Hermosa Beach, California, and took a degree in economics at UCLA in 1977. His brother Greg Ginn founded the band Black Flag and the label SST Records, and Pettibon designed the band's four-bar logo and many of the flyers and record sleeves of the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as the cover of Sonic Youth's Goo in 1990. The drawings, mostly pen and ink on paper, combine images out of comics, film noir, pulp and American popular culture — surfers on huge waves, steam trains, Gumby, Batman, baseball players — with handwritten texts drawn from Henry James, Proust, Mickey Spillane and the Bible or written by him, so that word and image argue rather than illustrate each other. He received the Bucksbaum Award at the Whitney Biennial of 2004, and the New Museum gave him a retrospective, A Pen of All Work, in 2017.
Most of his work is ink on paper, unique and made in very large numbers, from small sheets to large drawings combining several images; paintings on canvas and wall drawings are rarer. The drawings are usually titled No Title, followed in brackets by the opening words of their text, and those words, the date and the dimensions are how a work is identified. Early drawings were also reproduced in zines and flyers, so a printed reproduction should not be confused with an original. Prints and artist's books exist in editions. Provenance through his galleries, Regen Projects and David Zwirner among them, is the usual check.
Tucson, Hermosa Beach and SST
In the late 1980s and 1990s he made low-budget video films with friends from the art and music worlds, among them The Book of Manson and Sir Drone.
His work is in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
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