The
Renaissance
Society

This premiere museum exhibition will feature over 600 drawings by this enigmatic California-based artist. Highly idiosyncratic, Pettibon's drawings address various aspects of cultural knowledge. Influenced by the cartoon's mode of representation, Pettibon incorporates references as wide-ranging as Blake, Goya, Gumby, Batman, and the Bible in drawings that shun strict narrative, and instead combine pictures and texts with a semantic friction related to the determining principals of modernism's "Stream of Consciousness" literature.

This exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Following its exhibition at the Renaissance Society, it will travel to The Drawing Center, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.