Richard Pettibone: Icons revisited

Vedovi Gallery is delighted to present Richard Pettibone: Icons revisited, an exhibition celebrating one of the most prominent figure of Appropriation art with a selection of works encompassing 45 years of his prolific career.

Richard Pettibone has captivated the audience since the 1960s by producing miniaturized versions of iconic works of 20th century masters amongst which Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein. Through the lens of miniature, Richard Pettibone has created a striking and unique comment on authorship and originality and has thus paved the way for 1980's appropriation art.

Pettibone graduated from the Otis Art Institute in 1962. His first works involved shadow boxes featuring small assemblages anticipating his interest toward the act of miniaturization. In 1964, he completed his first appropriation work; two small scale replicas of Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup cans. The size of his creations was originally inspired to match the reproductions of the original works he found in art magazines such as Artforum. Since this turning point, Pettibone has devoted his career to the exploration of the personalizing effect of scale. His paintings are skillfully painted gems conveying a clever mixture between homage, playfulness and ironic provocation as the artist intentionally chooses works commenting on seriality.

The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to explore the development of Pettibone’s artistic preoccupations, from the earliest works focusing on the Pop and modernist artists to his expansion to older masters such as Picasso and to borrowed images of the common American imaginary such as the railroad system also included in this exhibition.

Richard Pettibone currently lives and works in New York. His works are included in the permanent collections of international and prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. He was the subject of numerous exhibitions, including a career retrospective at the Laguna Art Museum in 2005.