Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with exhibition held at CAC Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, September 22 - December 3, 2006 ; traveled to Kestnergesellschaft, February 16 - May 6, 2007. Includes essays by Fernando Francés, Frank-Thorsten Moll, and interview with Pettibon by Aaron Rose. Richly illustrated throughout. Biography, bibliography. Texts in English and German. "Raymond Pettibon, born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, numbers among the best-known and successful artists of his generation. Having gained renown for the drawings which are presented in a space-encompassing manner and which are often oriented towards controversial political and social themes and are firmly anchored in popular American culture, he has recently received much international attention as a film artist. The Kestnergesellschaft, in collaboration with the CAC Málaga, mounted this solo exhibition which brought together recent works of these past years, among them two animation films being shown in Germany for the first time. Raymond Pettibon belongs to a group of artists which come from the West Coast of the United States and which have made a name for themselves in the art world in recent years. He has the reputation of being both a complex and unclassifiable artist who listens to the restless heartbeat of the West and whose drawings examine the contradictions, fault lines and discontinuities of a world view. He deliberately derives his key themes from the inexhaustible source of social and political concerns around which he revolves artistically through the medium of drawing. In the pointed thematic emphasis of his works, he is always concerned on a primary level with problem fields which, directly or indirectly, have to do with the experiential world of the West, but through his investigation of the role of the USA in political, economic and military matters, his focus also turns to global themes. Through his uncompromising directness and unsparing openness, he places his drawing pencil in many an open wound so that, not without justification, he counts as a solitary figure even in the highly controversial art scene. He derives his inspiration from the most diverse sources of pop cultures, such as comics and cartoons, cinema in general and film noir in particular. Superman and Che Guevara, the United States flag and the dollar sign thus often constitute repeated, symbolic images which run through his entire oeuvre. He sets up a contrast to these symbols through both his own texts and found written fragments which establish a counterweight within the drawings and thereby maintain their dramatic tension." -- publisher's statement.
