Artist: Richard Pettibone

Timothy Taylor presents an exhibition of works by American artist Richard Pettibone (b. 1938, d. 2024) in London. The exhibition brings together a focused selection of paintings spanning several decades of the artist’s practice, offering an introduction to Pettibone’s singular contribution to post-war American art. Organised in collaboration with the Pettibone Estate and Castelli Gallery, this presentation marks the first solo exhibition of Pettibone’s work in the UK.

The exhibition features intimately scaled paintings dating from 1967 to 2021, tracing the evolution of Pettibone’s approach to appropriation. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the artist produced meticulously rendered, reduced-scale versions of canonical works, re-examining ideas of authorship, reproduction, and artistic influence. While best known for his engagements with Pop art, his references extended across centuries, reflecting a sustained fascination with the history of images and their cultural resonance. Executed at a fraction of the scale of their sources, Pettibone’s paintings are neither replicas nor reproductions, but independent works that transform acts of looking, remembering, and collecting.

Drawn from important private collections and supplemented by works from the Pettibone Estate and Castelli Gallery—which began exhibiting Pettibone in 1969—the exhibition brings together paintings after some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Works referencing Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Ed Ruscha appear alongside others that reveal the breadth of Pettibone’s interests and influences. In repeated engagements with motifs such as Warhol’s Flowers and Campbell’s Soup Cans, Lichtenstein’s comic-book imagery, and Duchamp’s Fountain, Pettibone explores how images circulate, endure, and accrue meaning over time.

Executed over more than five decades, the works on view reveal a practice defined as much by close observation and admiration as by appropriation. Through precise acts of translation and reduction, Pettibone transformed some of the most recognisable images in modern art into works that are distinctly his own.