Richard Pettibone

b. Los Angeles, CA, 1938, d. Cobleskill, NY, 19 August 2024. 

Richard Pettibone is one of the pioneers of Appropriation Art, the practice of quoting, copying or deforming objects or pre-existing works of art, which was developed by numerous artists in the second half of the 20th century. In 1964, in Los Angeles, he began painting his emblematic series of miniature replicas or copies of works by his New York contemporaries, true to the scale of reproduction of the images in Art Forum magazine, to which he had access. From Marcel Duchamp's bicycle wheel, Andy Warhol's soup cans, Roy Lichtenstein's works and Jasper Johns' flags, Pettibone created his own collection and sometimes even associated or linked the artists together in the Combine paintings series for example.

Richard Pettibone's first solo exhibitions were held at the Ferus Gallery in 1965 and at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1969. He has been the subject of significant retrospective exhibitions at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art in 2005 and at the Laguna Art Museum in 2006. His works feature among the collections of numerous prestigious institutions including the MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as the MoCA in Los Angeles.