Richard Pettibone (born 1938, Los Angeles) is one of the pioneers of Appropriation art, the practice of quoting, copying or deforming objects or pre-existing works of art, which was developed by numerous artists in the second half of the 20th century.
As a young painter, Richard Pettibone made a name for himself when he began replicating on a miniature scale works by famous artists. His selection process is careful and deliberate, and reveals his deep respect for those whose work forms the basis of his own. His versions of Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Jasper Johns’ flags, Frank Stella’s black paintings, and countless more works by Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian and Constantin Brancusi - all miniature sized to evoke the intimacy of the works. Pettibone is often seen as having paved the way for 1980s appropriation art, raising questions about the ownership of ideas and the nature of originality.
The artist reproduced those works he most admired in order to better appropriate, conserve and admire them. Marcel Duchamp (bicycle wheel), along with Andy Warhol (Campbell soup cans) were of significant influence. Pettibone encountered their ideas at full force in Warhol’s first gallery show (of the Campbell soup cans) at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1965 and at Leo Castelli in 1969.
Between 2005-2006 the artist had a retrospective of approximately 200 paintings and sculptures at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs.
At the beginning of the 1970s, he moved to Charlotteville, New York where he continues to work today.