Surfers 1985-2015

Surfers 1985-2015 gathers three decades of Raymond Pettibon's ink drawings of breaking waves. It is the fullest edition of his surf work to date, a revised and expanded version of a 2014 volume that sold out almost as soon as it appeared.

Published in 2015 by Venus Over Manhattan and David Zwirner Books, this edition adds twenty works to the original printing along with new color separations and a new jacket design. Across 136 pages, the drawings show an ocean roiling with chaotic swells, each captioned in Pettibon's own hand with non sequiturs, overheard quotations, and fragments of poetry. Texts by Adam Lindemann and Carlo McCormick accompany the plates. The book is now out of print.

Waves are one of Pettibon's most sustained subjects. He has returned to surf imagery in other publications too, including Point Break: Raymond Pettibon, Surfers and Waves and a 2023 cover for The Surfer's Journal. The same hand-lettered text runs through this body of work as through his concert flyers for the Los Angeles punk scene, Black Flag among them. It also runs through his drawings built from lines by writers such as William Blake, Marcel Proust, John Ruskin, and Walt Whitman. The wave, like the flyer or the literary fragment, becomes another surface for his handwriting to work against.