DAVID ZWIRNER WILL INAUGURATE HIS NEW GALLERY IN PARIS WITH FRENCHETTE, AN EXHIBITION OF NEW WORKS BY RAYMOND PETTIBON. IT WILL BE THE FIRST SOLO EXHIBITION OF THE AMERICAN ARTIST IN PARIS SINCE 1999.
These new works will feature both entirely new subjects as well as characters and motifs that Petti- bon has returned to often: Gumby, baseball, US pre- sidents, animals, totalitarian dictators, and waves. Pettibon’s influential oeuvre engages a wide spec-
trum of American iconography pulled from lite- rature, art history, philosophy, religion, politics, sports, and alternative youth culture. Intermixing 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 Blake, Proust, Ruskin, and Whitman. His exploration of the visual and critical potential of drawing harkens back to the traditions of satire and social critique while reinforcing the impor- tance of the medium within contemporary art and culture today.
