Exceptional Works: Raymond Pettibon

“Big-wave surfing is of epic proportions. It has to do with what you call the sublime, going back to Edmund Burke. It has to do with making artwork about nature at its most epic, its most ferocious. Caspar David Friedrich. Frederic Edwin Church. Turner.”

—Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon

No Title (The room is...), 2016

Acrylic, watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper

55 1/8 x 72 1/2 inches (140 x 184.2 cm)
Framed: 61 1/8 x 79 1/4 inches (155.3 x 201.3 cm)

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An iconic drawing by the celebrated American artist Raymond Pettibon, No Title (The room is…) (2016) depicts a lone surfer in the barrel of a gigantic wave. A sublime contemporary image, this work encapsulates themes that are central to Pettibon’s acclaimed practice, including the vital combination of image and text, references to pop culture, and nature and abstraction. Depictions of waves and surfers—a series begun in 1985—are among the artist’s most recognizable subjects, alluding to the surfaces of abstract expressionist canvases and the seascapes of J. M. W. Turner, as well as Pettibon’s deep reading of writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Walt Whitman. Related works feature in major museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This work is featured on the occasion of the gallery's presentation at Art Basel, 2022.

Raymond Pettibon, 2019. Photo by Jason Schmidt

“Pettibon’s surfers at times appear as comic-strip, super-heroic projectiles, and then again, as frail tentative ghosts on the verge of vanishing within the cataracts of mounting ocean waves,” the art historian Brian Lukacher writes in Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves.“The surfing figures serve as metaphoric life preservers for the viewer.…

“Within the history of nineteenth-century art, Pettibon’s conversationalists range from … J. M. W. Turner and his late marines, to … Victor Hugo and his private drawings and experimental inkblots.”

Raymond Pettibon painting at David Zwirner, New York, 2011

“No subject better captures the spirit of Mr. Pettibon’s drawings than that of surfers dwarfed by towering waves.”

—Nancy Princenthal

“Looking at Pettibon’s minuscule surfers isolated within the barrel wall of variegated blue-and-white towering ocean waves, the Lucretian spectator must wonder: Are these eyespots of humanity ones of heroic transcendence and self-realization, or ones of hopeless insignificance and perpetually imminent loss? Not surprisingly, it is a bit of both.”

—Brian Lukacher

J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in This Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich, 1842. Tate, London

“One of the central marine paintings of Turner’s late period (after 1835) has a direct bearing on the compositional and dramatic fulcrums of Pettibon’s surfing pictures. This renowned painting by Turner has the following title: Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth Making Signals in Shallow Water, and Going by the Lead. The Author Was in This Storm on the Night the Ariel Left Harwich (1842),” Lukacher writes.

“Although Pettibon’s medium and palette are distinct from late Turner paintings such as this one, his persistent modifications of dynamic wave formations and centrifugal illusions of perpetual motion remain Turnerian.”

In this video, Pettibon discusses the work of J.M.W. Turner as part of The Artist Project at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

“The incorporation of human experience and identity within the limitless power of the sea was also posed by the mid-nineteenth-century drawings of the literary giant and public celebrity Victor Hugo,” Lukacher explains. “The monochromatic sobriety and almost impenetrable shadows of Hugo’s seascapes may seem far afield from the streaking colors of Pettibon’s surfing drawings, but they overlap in their graphic energy and their depiction of cavernous enfilades of arcing waves.

“Particularly relevant to Pettibon is Hugo’s 1867 drawing Ma destinée (My destiny). Hugo’s bold inscription of his name and the insertion of the title directly into the image field anticipate Pettibon’s textual incursions.”

Victor Hugo, Ma destinée (My Destiny), 1867. Maisons de Victor Hugo, Paris

Raymond Pettibon, No Title (The room is...), 2016 (detail)

Victor Hugo, Ma destinée (My Destiny), 1867 (detail)

“Regarded as matter, it [a wave] is a mass; regarded as a force, it is an abstraction. It equalizes and unites all phenomena. It may be called the infinite in combination.… It dissolves all differences, and absorbs them into its own unity. Its elements are so numerous that it becomes identity.”

—Victor Hugo, 1888

Installation view, Raymond Pettibon: Frenchette, David Zwirner, Paris, 2019

Installation view, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, New Museum, New York, 2017

“The surfing pictures may serve as a diluvial salvation from a humiliated society and the distorting, degrading mass media it has created, and which so often informs Pettibon’s own artistic idioms.… This body of work entails gestures of cleansing, purging, and regressing.”

—Brian Lukacher

Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves, published by David Zwirner Books, 2022, and featuring texts by Jamie Brisick and Brian Lukacher, and contributions by Emily Erickson and Stephanie Gilmore.

“Some things (sea foam, for instance) cannot be drawn at all, but only surfed.”

—Raymond Pettibon

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