Are Your Motives Pure - Surfers 1985-2014

Are Your Motives Pure? Surfers 1985-2014 gathers nearly three decades of Raymond Pettibon's surfer paintings, a single running image inside his sprawling private vocabulary: a lone rider holding a line against a huge, breaking wave.

Venus Over Manhattan published the 102-page softcover in 2014, with a foreword by Adam Lindemann and an essay by Carlo McCormick. It moves from Pettibon's early, small-scale monochrome India ink drawings through the color paintings he introduced in the 1990s to a handful of rare large-scale canvases. In nearly every image the ocean is turbulent. Handwritten quotations, non sequiturs, and lines of poetry crowd the paper, so the wave carries as much text as figure.

Pettibon has drawn recurring figures across his career: baseball players, pin-up vixens, light bulbs, trains, and subjects as different as Gumby and Charles Manson. The surfer is one more entry in that list, and his publisher singles it out as the closest thing to a stand-in for the artist, a solitary rider working against forces bigger than himself. Venus Over Manhattan returned to the same body of work the following year, publishing an expanded edition, Surfers 1985-2015, with David Zwirner Books.