Daumier – Pettibon

March 2–August 4, 2019

Curated by Andrea Lutz and David Schmidhauser, this exhibition brought together the work of Raymond Pettibon and the French caricaturist, printmaker, sculptor, and painter Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), an artist renowned both in his time and now for his incisive social and political critiques. Pettibon has long cited the importance of 18th- and 19th-century graphic artists for his drawings, which have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary. As Peter Schjeldahl writes in a review of Pettibon’s extensive solo exhibition A Pen of All Work at the New Museum in 2017, "Though never employing caricature, the work’s effect updates a tradition of pointed grotesquerie that has roots in Hogarth, Goya, and Daumier and branches in the modern editorial cartoon: aesthetic pleasure checked by the absurdity or the horror—the scandal—of the subject at hand."

Daumier – Pettibon featured a new mural (No Title (Daumier-Pettibon Father of...)) created by Pettibon specially for the exhibition as well as a large selection of his works on paper spanning the late 1970s to 2017. These were presented alongside prints, paintings, and sculptures by Daumier. Pettibon described this exhibition as "A dream come true."

Through March 10, 2019, David Zwirner presented a Viewing Room of Pettibon’s drawings from the 1980s, many of which had never been shown before. Raymond Pettibon: Noir highlighted a body of work that was made while the artist was living in Los Angeles, embracing the wide spectrum of American high and low culture. This Viewing Room was curated by gallery director Andrea Cashman.

Image: Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Daumier-Pettibon Father of...), 2019 (detail)