RICHARD PETTIBONE
2016-04-18A fine balance of reverence and criticality is at work in Richard Pettibone’s sculptures, paintings, and photographs. Since the 1960s, Pettibone has painstakingly remade works by other artists on a tiny scale. Like transliterations of epic poems into haikus, his diminutive versions of artworks by historical heavyweights from Piet Mondrian to Andy Warhol are constructed with precision and resonate with care. In combination with their small size, the exacting sensitivity Pettibone brings to his endeavor lends a generous intimacy to the experience of looking at his work.
A Los Angeles native, Pettibone saw Andy Warhol’s first west coast exhibition at Ferus Gallery and Marcel Duchamp’s retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The concepts of repetition and the ready-made as deployed in both artists’ work are upheld with an unwavering conviction in Pettibone’s oeuvre: Aesthetic ideas are taken up as ready-mades to be repeated in multiple versions over time. For this exhibition, a selection of works after Marcel Duchamp and Frank Stella evince Pettibone’s commitment to his craft. By reducing the scale of both iconic and lesser-known works by these canonical artists, Pettibone sets the acts of looking at and making art at the center of his practice.
Opposite – Frank Stella, ‘Clinton Plaza’, 1959, 2011
Exhibition runs through till April 23rd, 2016
Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034
