n°59

Raymond Pettibon was born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona. His work embraces a wide spectrum of American “high” and “low” culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Taking their points of departure in the Southern California punk-rock culture of the late 1970s and 1980s and the “do-it-yourself” aesthetic of album covers, comics, concert flyers, and fanzines that characterized the movement, his drawings have come to occupy their own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary.

Marcel Dzama was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Canada. His work is characterized by an immediately recognizable visual language that draws from a diverse range of references and artistic influences, including Dada and Marcel Duchamp. While he has become known for his prolific drawings with their distinctive palette of muted colors, in recent years, the artist has expanded his practice to encompass sculpture, painting, film, and dioramas.

Their collaboration began in Summer 2015 with the artists swapping the first of a series of drawings to be completed by the other. In a variation of the “exquisite corpse” method in which a partner is only given portions of an otherwise concealed drawing to work on, Dzama and Pettibon developed each other’s compositions through illustrations, collage, and writing. Just as the surrealists invented the technique in the early twentieth century as a playful and ultimately enriching exercise, the present drawings combine the two artists’ distinct styles in a revealing and often seamless fashion. In several works, it is almost impossible to determine who made what, which indicates how both strove to assimilate the other’s vision or anticipate his response.