Musée Picasso, Paris, France
October 14, 2025–March 1, 2026
Alongside the exhibition "Philip Guston. The Irony of History," the Musée National Picasso-Paris is dedicating an exhibition to American artist Raymond Pettibon, with the support of the David Zwirner gallery. Through seventy drawings and a dozen fanzines, the exhibition explores the ironic and disturbing world of this major artist of our time.
A self-taught artist born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, Raymond Pettibon emerged in the late 1970s on the Californian punk-rock scene by designing album covers for the band Black Flag, founded by his brother Greg Ginn. He also began exhibiting and publishing his first drawings, which were part of the do-it-yourself aesthetic of comics, flyers, and fanzines characteristic of the punk movement. Pettibon's drawings draw on a wide range of sources, from literature to art history, from popular culture to religion, from politics to sports.
Resolutely anti-authoritarian, Pettibon's work paints, through grating images, accompanied by shattering inscriptions, a scathing portrait of a nihilistic and violent American society, marked by the end of the hippie dream and the return of conservatism. Willingly disturbing and undisciplined, relentlessly questioning the American dream, as Philip Guston - admired by Pettibon - did in his time - it places the visitor in an uncomfortable situation, pushing him to reconsider his own values.
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