David Nolan New York
527 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001
t: +1 212 925 6190
f: +1 212 334 9139
info@davidnolangallery.com
Don't Miss It!
Richard Pettibone at David Nolan Gallery
By ANDREW RUSSETH
If you’re employed at a Monday-through-Friday job, it’s time to schedule a long, relaxing lunch break before the end of the week, to ensure that you make it over to David Nolan Gallery’s delectable Richard Pettibone survey before it closes this Friday, Aug. 9. It is one hell of a treat, and it would be a shame to miss it.
The show features 45 works by Mr. Pettibone (not to be confused with Raymond Pettibon) dating from 1964 through 2003. Most are the loving, miniature reproductions of contemporary art that he has been making for the past 50 years—Warhol soup cans, Lichtenstein beauties and Stellas shrunken down to just a few inches on each side.
Many of these tiny paintings of paintings, scattered elegantly across the gallery’s walls, date from just a few years after the now-iconic originals were made, a reminder that Mr. Pettibone may have had as good an eye for enduring works as that other great—though very different— proto-appropriationist of the time, Sturtevant, whose work took the form of full-scale repetitions of works by many of the same artists that Pettibone examined.
Mr. Pettibone’s a careful, committed miniaturist, and so his paintings have the feel of small devotional pieces, but also charming, polished little souvenirs—things ready to be loved on an intimate scale, in the comfort of your home, or your head. (There is also a full room of Pettibone pieces relating to one of his enduring inspirations, Duchamp, whose 1935–41 Boîte-en-valise involved ingenious feats of miniaturization.)
Why shrink something down over and over again? Duchamp did it in his dozens of
Boîtes, his portable museums, the art historian T. J. Demos has argued, in part as a response to his itinerancy at the time, and the encroaching threat of war. It was a way of keeping his works accessible, and in circulation.
Mr. Pettibone’s project shares and expands on those motivations. Remade, and refashioned at a fraction of their original size, his Warhols, Lichtensteins and so forth are also reduced, in a very wonderful sense, to their basic ideas, as distinct from their original (now very pricey) objects. They are ready to be used, to be
considered in new ways, to be deployed.
And that is exactly what Mr. Pettibone does in a few particularly sharp pieces here, in which he has painted what are in effect collages of various paintings that abut and overlap one another, as in the awkwardly titled, 28-inch-long Duchamp “Pliant de Voyage. 1917″; Warhol, Andy “Jackie, 1964″ (twelve times); and Stella, Frank “Hampton Roads” (from 1969), which includes all of those works in a row, like a coded poem about conceptual art, Pop, celebrity and postwar abstraction that is awaiting your reading.
Another pairs a Lichtenstein painting of a finger on the trigger of a gun with two colorful Stella abstractions. The Stellas are positioned below, just below the trigger, one sliding into place place behind the other, like another bullet entering the chamber.
Art in Review
Richard Pettibone: Paintings and Sculpture: 1964-2003
By KEN JOHNSON
Magical thinking secretly underwrites many types of conceptual art. Sherrie Levine, for example, magically acquired power over certain famous male photographers by copying their works. Miniaturization, Richard Pettibone’s approach, is a similar way to master otherwise domineering things. Mr. Pettibone (born 1938) has devoted his career to making small reproductions of works by Brancusi, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Stella and other artists whose fame far exceeded his. There is a comical asymmetry between his efforts and theirs, but also something mysterious, as if his were made for a voodoo dollhouse. This show presents about 45 pieces dating from 1964 to 2003.
Assiduous craftsmanship is part of what makes Mr. Pettibone’s works absorbing. With canvases neatly tacked to wooden stretchers framed by thin wooden strips of the sort popular in the 1970s, his paintings are actually little sculptures. One of his earliest pieces is a baseball card-size construction of a Warhol soup can painting that was supposedly run over by a train, the torn canvas of its damaged lower edge revealing its faithfully detailed underlying stretcher bars.
Many pieces are philosophically provocative. Two three-dimensional works are in the form of diminutive Brillo boxes. They miniaturize works by Warhol, of course. But they could represent actual Brillo boxes. How do you know the difference? It’s a conundrum.
The gallery’s small rear space is filled with copies of works by Marcel Duchamp, including a beautifully painted version of his Cubist masterpiece, “The Bride,” and a life-size “Bicycle Wheel.” Why Duchamp? He was modern art’s great sorcerer, Mr. Pettibone one of his craftiest apprentices.
View on nytimes.com