Retro redux

The first retrospective of Richard Pettibone’s work in more than 20 years will be exhibited from March 12 through May 28 at Laguna Art Museum.

Pettibone made his mark on the art world in the 1950s and 1960s by “appropriating” works of famous Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Frank Stella, as well as replicating and commenting on artworks by modern masters such as Dadaist Marcel Duchamp.

“Richard Pettibone’s small construction/ paintings of the 1960s ? appropriations of work by Warhol, Stella and [Roy] Lichtenstein ? were a defining aspect of a peculiarly West Coast current of ‘Conceptual Pop,’” the museum’s chief curator Tyler Stallings said.

Pettibone began by making models of toy trains and airplanes before maturing into an artist who utilized and miniaturized other artists’ work as an original art form, Stallings said.

“In the 1960s, he found his voice in diminutive ‘copies’ of newly famous New York pop artists,” Stalling said.

The artist’s replicas of minimalist Brancusi sculptures were paired with models of simple early American furnishings ? a method of “commenting” on one work by juxtaposing it with another.

“Pettibone’s visual punning and aesthetic elegance is evident in his simple juxtaposition of an elegant Shaker table with a minimalist, industrial I-beam,” Stallings said.

Far from plagiarizing the works, he acknowledges the original artists by titling many of the works with their names, such as “Train Destroys Valuable Art Object, Andy Warhol, ‘Pepper Pot,’” 1962.

Pettibone is not only fascinated by visual artists.

Beginning in the late 1980s, he became interested in the poetry and criticism of Ezra Pound, and created a group of paintings based on the original covers of Pound’s publications.

In the 1990s, he focused on the work of Piet Mondrian, whose paintings he both replicated and “reduced” in sculptural constructions.

“But without doubt, his most insistent and unifying theme has been his ever-expanding colloquy with two paradoxical giants of 20th-century art, Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, whose work continues to inspire him today,” Stallings said.

A New York-based artist since the 1970s, he is currently represented by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York.

The exhibition, which originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and has been shown at Skidmore College, will include approximately 200 paintings and 15 free-standing sculptures. A 192-page color catalog accompanies the exhibit.

The museum is holding two events in conjunction with the retrospective: