About the Exhibit - Frenchette

Not only was Frenchette, Raymond Pettibon’s eleventh gallery show with David Zwirner, but it was also the first show ever to be held at Zwirner’s new Paris location in La Marais at 108, rue Vieille du Temple. 

The exhibit opened on October 16th, right in time for FIAC, featuring new drawings as well as some of his most classic works. 

“Through his exploration of the visual and critical potential of drawing, Pettibon’s practice harkens back to the traditions of satire and social critique in the work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists and caricaturists such as William Hogarth, Gustave Doré, and Honoré Daumier, while reinforcing the importance of the medium within contemporary art and culture today.” (source) 

“The artist's almost stream-of-consciousness style is a signature, where baseball, surfing, cartoons and politics are all intertwined and blended together in a messy but elegant presentation and body of work.” - Juxtapoz (source) 

“In the works depicting Gumby, Pettibon recodes the wide-eyed innocence of the classic children’s television character as strung-out paranoia.” (source) 

About the Artist 

Unlike most artists, he doesn’t have a BA or MFA, but rather a degree in economics from UCLA. 

“Raymond Pettibon intermixes image and text, his drawings engage the visual rhetorics of pop and commercial culture while incorporating language from mass media as well as classic texts by writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Walt Whitman.” - David Zwirner (source) 

“Mr. Pettibon is, with gratifying regularity, a sharp political critic. It is the most interesting thing about him. His targets can be quite specific: the drug-wrecked hippie movement of the 1960s, the American war in Iraq. Yet his entire output, despite interludes of lyricism and nostalgia, and a running strain of stand-up humor, is a steady indictment of American culture as he has lived it over the past 60 years” - NYT (source) 

He lives and works in NYC, and He’s represented by David Zwirner Gallery in New York and Regen Projects in LA.