Raymond Pettibon: Underground

Presented in parallel with Philip Guston’s exhibition “The Irony of History”, the Musée national Picasso-Paris hosts an exhibition devoted to American artist Raymond Pettibon, organised with the support of David Zwirner Gallery. Through seventy drawings and around ten fanzines, the show delves into the ironic and unsettling universe of one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art.

Born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, and largely self-taught, Pettibon emerged in the late 1970s within the Californian punk-rock scene, designing album covers for Black Flag, the band founded by his brother Greg Ginn. From this milieu he developed a prolific practice of drawings, comics, flyers, and fanzines infused with punk’s DIY aesthetic. Over the decades, his works have drawn on an eclectic range of sources, spanning literature, art history, religion, politics, popular culture, and sport.

Resolutely anti-authoritarian, his imagery fuses incisive, often disturbing drawings with acerbic textual fragments, producing a caustic portrait of American society marked by violence, nihilism, and disillusion. Exposing the failure of the countercultural dream and the resurgence of conservatism, Pettibon’s works disrupt conventions and unsettle expectations. Their corrosive humour echoes the unflinching gaze of Philip Guston, an artist he has long admired, confronting viewers with an uncomfortable space where ideals and values are laid bare for scrutiny.