Press Release: Richard Pettibone

Retrospective of Work by Richard Pettibone to Open at the Tang

For the past 40 years, artist Richard Pettibone has made miniature replicas of the artworks he most admired, borrowing from Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol, among others. More than 200 of his exquisite homages to major modern artworks will be on view Nov. 19, 2005 to Feb. 12, 2006 at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Richard Pettibone: A Retrospective.

Organized by the Tang Museum and the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, Calif., the exhibit was co-curated by Tang curator Ian Berry and independent curator and critic Michael Duncan. After its premiere showing earlier this year at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, a New York Times review said that "it is unlikely that so much artistic ground has ever been covered outside of an art history survey book or a museum postcard display, and probably never quite so pleasurably."

Pettibone's earliest works were shadow-box assemblages, many featuring locomotives. But it was in the small painting constructions he began to make in the 1960s that he found his medium--tracing details from works by then newly famous artists like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein from the pages of Artforum, then silk-screening, painting, and framing them on tiny, handcrafted stretcher bars.

In the 1980s, Pettibone created replicas of such iconic Constantin Brancusi sculptures such as Bird in Space and Endless Column, often joining them to beautifully pared-down forms of Shaker furniture. His admiration for modernist poet Ezra Pound resulted in a series of paintings that reproduce the original front covers of Pound's books. In the 1990s, he reimagined Piet Mondrian paintings in the form of sculptural constructions.

Pettibone's early work was panned as "lacking in originality," but critics now admire his meticulous craft, his connoisseur's eye, and his ability to play off major late-20th century artworks against each other in ways that illuminate both. Writing in the exhibition's catalogue, curator Michael Duncan notes that "his work makes us see that all of art is a kind of miniature, condensing larger experiences into compact spaces."

Richard Pettibone: A Retrospective will be accompanied at the Tang Museum by three free public events. They include a Dunkerley Dialogue between Pettibone and curator Berry beginning at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 19, followed by an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m., and a noon curator's tour on Tuesday, Nov. 29. The exhibition catalogue will be available in the Tang's Museum Store.

The Tang Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday; the museum is closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission is free; donations are suggested. For more information about Tang events and exhibitions, call 518-580-8080 or go to www.skidmore.edu/tang.

PDF: Richard Pettibone: A Retrospective Richard_Pettibone_PR.pdf