Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015

Raymond Pettibon (born 1957) has created a vocabulary of characters that reappear consistently across his oeuvre. The most poetic and revealing of these may be the surfer, the solitary longboarder challenging a massive wave. This revised and expanded edition of Raymond Pettibon: Surfers 1985-2015, the first printing of which sold out almost immediately upon publication in 2014, features 20 additional works, as well as new color separations and jacket design. Nearly all the works depict an ocean roiling with chaotic swells, accompanied by non sequiturs, quotations and bits of poetry in the artist's handwriting. Organized chronologically, the publication traces the surfer series, from early small-scale monochrome India ink drawings to numerous examples from the 1990s when the artist introduced color, culminating with his recent large-scale works, some of which were executed directly on a wall. Rounding out the publication is a meditation by the writer Carlo McCormick.