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Raymond Pettibon, born in 1957, he is one of the most recognized Californian artists, known for his depictions of surfers riding the waves of the Pacific Ocean, which at auction have exceeded 3 million euros (a record set by Phillips in New York in 2021). Represented by powerful galleries such as David Zwirner and Regen Projects, in his works he has been able to incorporate elements of American iconography, mixing the visual language of pop culture and mass media with texts derived from writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin e Walt Wihtman.
But even before becoming famous and exhibiting in commercial galleries, Raymond Pettibon, an economist by training, began his career as an artist by designing album covers and concert flyers for the Californian punk scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. “It will happen like the psychedelic posters of the 1960s,” Pettibon himself, then twenty-seven, had predicted 40 years ago in an article in Jeff Spurrier appeared in the Los Angeles Times on July 1, 1984. “Once those kids grow up and start making money, it’s a way of reclaiming their past. But then the art dies. They just become artifacts.”
The Platzker Collection
And so it was. More than 200 lots including album covers, flyers, posters, artist books, and skateboards designed by Pettibon from that period went up for auction at Wright di Chicago Thursday, August 22 in a dedicated sale that realized more than $100,000, with 98% sold by lot and 99% by value. They came from the collection of David Platzkerthe director of Specific Object, a gallery and bookshop that sells unique works of art, editions, artist’s books, but also alternative literature and music. Before founding the gallery, from 2013 to 2018, he was a curator in the Drawings and Prints department at MoMA in New York and, from 1998 to 2004, executive director of Printed Matter, a non-profit institution dedicated to the promotion of artists’ books.
Pettibon began this production at the instigation of one of his brothers, Greg Ginnguitarist of the famous punk band Black Flag and founder of the record label SST Records. He was the one who commissioned the album covers of the bands represented by SST Records, as well as flyers, t-shirts, stickers, skateboards. Thus was born not only a new musical culture, which reflected youth dissatisfaction in a climate of social and political malaise, but also an aesthetic, which Pettibon helped define with his decisive and disturbing graphic style.
“My drawings are violent,” Pettibon said in the same Los Angeles Times article. “And that’s because of the medium, because I’m using only one frame. You can’t tell a whole story in all the detail. It’s like taking a frame out of a movie or a crucial scene out of a book at a critical point. You just can’t be subtle.”