Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon was born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, he lives and works in New York. He came to prominence in the early 1980s in the Southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for the punk rock band Black Flag and the record label SST Records, both founded by his older brother Greg Ginn.

Pettibon’s work embraces a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Taking their points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and the “do-it-yourself” aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement, his drawings have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary.

“I could do a thousand drawings of a certain thing, and that doesn’t mean it’s more important to me. On the other hand, there are things that interest me about surfing or baseball, more so than other sports, and that’s a factor. But that really doesn’t come back to me so much. It’s not personal.”