Raymond Pettibon’s new edition, No Title (Our Secret Spot.), 2022, at Derriere L’Etoile Studios in New York, 2022. Photo by Max Burkhalter
This online-only presentation debuts a limited-edition lithograph featuring Raymond Pettibon’s most notable motif: the iconic wave, a subject the artist has explored in his practice for nearly three decades.
The new work is published by David Zwirner’s fine art print publisher, Utopia Editions, and coincides with the release of the artist’s latest publication, Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves.
No Title (Our Secret Spot.) is the latest work in Pettibon’s ongoing series of drawings, paintings, and prints that depict surfers and waves, begun in 1985 when he was living in Venice Beach, California.
“In a favorite motif, a tiny surfer rides a monstrous wave, as philosophical thoughts attend: ‘The sand and water to which we are reducible are as a rock to me’ or ‘Don’t complicate the moral world.’”
—Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker
Photo by Baptiste Lignel, 2011
“[Pettibon] did a spectacular series of surfing pictures, all big blue waves.… Figures are reduced to specks or eliminated. Texts are so small as to be barely visible. Experimentation with color and line is the story here … finally art that invites maximum looking and requires minimum reading.”
—Holland Cotter, The New York Times
Installation view, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, New Museum, New York, 2017. Photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio
Installation view, Raymond Pettibon, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, 1999. Courtesy The Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo by Brian Forrest
Installation view, Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work, The Bonnefanten, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 2017. Photo by Peter Cox
Installation view, Raymond Pettibon: Frenchette, David Zwirner, Paris, 2019
The six-color lithograph No Title (Our Secret Spot.) was printed at Derriere L’Etoile Studios in New York, where Pettibon has collaborated with master printer Maurice Sanchez for more than two decades. Photo by Max Burkhalter, 2022
Ink is prepped for the printing of No Title (Our Secret Spot.) at Derriere L’Etoile Studios. Photo by Max Burkhalter
The rollers of an offset lithographic press are inked to pull an impression of Untitled (Our Secret Spot.). Photo by Max Burkhalter
Ink drips as the printing press is cleaned. Photo by Max Burkhalter
A layer of No Title (Our Secret Spot.) is printed. Photo by Max Burkhalter
The new edition also shares similarities with Pettibon’s first waves of the 1980s and 1990s, which were more graphic and vertical in nature, such as the 1987 works No Title (We have seen…) and No Title (Don’t complicate…), the latter of which is in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was shown there in 2000.
Raymond Pettibon, No Title (We have seen...), 1987
Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Don’t complicate...), 1987
Pettibon’s new prints on the wall of Derriere L’Etoile Studios. Photo by Max Burkhalter
Raymond Pettibon, No Title (Our Secret Spot.), 2022 (detail)