Castelli Gallery is pleased to present Richard Pettibone: The American Flag, an exhibition of fifteen new paintings that the artist realized between 2020 and 2021. The exhibition is taking place at the gallery’s midtown location, at 24 West 40th Street.
Richard Pettibone is one of the central figures of the discourse on Appropriation Art, which developed out of the Pop Art movement in the early 1960s. At the beginning of his career, Pettibone appropriated the work of artists who were his contemporaries, such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns. As a source for his work, Pettibone used images printed in the pages of Artforum. The artist copied them faithfully, developing a technique that became his iconic style of making miniature versions of artworks.
With the new paintings, Pettibone returns to one of his most familiar subjects: Jasper Johns and the American flag. Several paintings in the exhibition are faithful appropriations of Johns’s work. Others elaborate on Johns, or are completely independent from Johns’s work. In this way, Pettibone is once again challenging one of the fundamental concepts of Western art: the idea of authorship and originality. In speaking about his work and the creative process that has guided him throughout his career, Pettibone says, “No matter how accurately you copy something, you can’t get rid of yourself. It’s just always you.”
Accompanying this exhibition is an illustrated catalogue.