Looker-upper

Looker-Upper is the catalogue for Raymond Pettibon's 2011 exhibition at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, gathering new India-ink drawings that push his signature word-and-image pairings into more overtly political territory.

Contemporary Fine Arts published the staplebound, 48-page volume in 2011 to coincide with the Berlin show, reproducing the drawings in full color alongside installation photographs from the gallery. The works range from single laconic images to denser collages of caption and image, taking up subjects including Barack Obama and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside Pettibon's recurring imagery of sport, pulp fiction and psychedelia.

Pettibon came up in the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s, working mainly in India ink to pair drawn imagery with fragments of appropriated text. Looker-Upper extends that practice into a more pointed engagement with contemporary politics, a thread that runs through much of his output from the 2000s onward.