Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibon Exhibition

Brooke Alexander Editions

This event has ended.

This new exhibition presents the lithographs of Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibon as a dialogue between these two unique draftsmen.

Philip Guston made a number of prints in a burst of creativity during the last year of his life: 1980. This body of work is a long way from the Social Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism phases of his earlier career. Stark, black linear gestures and images sit atop plain white paper backgrounds, devoid of the pinks and blues often seen in his paintings. They exhibit the essence of the artist’s return to figuration and representation in his final decade. The cartoonish images are a silent record of Guston’s quiet, Upstate NY studio, where he lived after leaving New York City in the 1960s. In these prints, one spies shoes and coats thrown around, messy easels and piles of tools and detritus that, seen together create an intimate self portrait of the artist.

In the same year that Guston died, Raymond Pettibon was starting to gain serious attention for his drawings, especially the works he made for his brother’s band Black Flag. Like Guston, Pettibon has an illustrative style, often composed with black ink lines on plain paper. However, unlike Guston, Pettibon’s drawings include bits of text: collections of thoughts, sayings, criticisms and confrontations. Included in this exhibition are a number of lithographs published with Brooke Alexander. The most recent of these is the largest print Pettibon has made to-date: a black & white image of a surfer riding a giant wave, called Untitled (Hermosa Beach). One could say the Surfer is a self-depiction of the artist for Pettibon, the way that an old easel is for Guston, just as the act of surfing in the ocean and painting in Upstate woods were paths to inner peace for them both.