Raymond Pettibon: V-Boom (German Edition) (Hardcover)

by Raymond Pettibon (Author), Aaron Rose (Contributor), Francisco Javier San Martin (Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Raymond Pettibon is one of the most distinctive and highly regarded American artists of his generation. In the thousands of drawings he has produced over the last two decades, Pettibon stakes out a thematic territory that combines the bright, shiny world of American mass culture with its darkly complex undertows. Pettibon's imagery largely derives from the world of cartoons and popular culture: surfers, trains, baseball players, and cartoon characters. His prolific skill lies in his ability to make powerful and poetic associations between word and image. An avid reader, he isolates a phrase or word and inserts it into his drawing, not as a commentary but as an active graphic element, often written in capitals like a caption to the image. His works range in tone from the polemical to the confessional and introspective and explore the extremes of the human condition from the abject to the sublime.

Pettibon's work was originally produced for the attention of his friends-fellow artists and musicians in the punk scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s and early 1980s. At that time he combined painting, songwriting, performing, and video making for bands like Sonic Youth, Minutemen, and Black Flag.

Today his works are included in the permanent collections of public galleries throughout the world, and have been shown in many solo exhibitions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

About the Author
Born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, and now lives in Hermosa Beach. After graduating in Economics from UCLA, he worked briefly as a high school math teacher. Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist's books.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Kehrer Verlag; Bilingual edition (September 1, 2007)
• Language: German
• ISBN-10: 393958326X
• ISBN-13: 978-3939583264
• Product Dimensions: 10.6 x 8.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,052,408 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Question: Comics or art? Answer: art., January 25, 2008

By	Claude Reich (Florianopolis, Brazil and Paris, France) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The catalogue for an exhibition held in 2007, this book shows a very large sample of Pettibon's output (high-quality reproductions) and the accompanying essays give a new insight on the artist and the importance of the written word in his work. Quite a number of books have recently been published on Pettibon and I would say that this one is the best available.