Richard Pettibone

For its first participation at the fair, Galerie Mitterrand is giving pride of place to one of the pioneers of appropriation art, the American artist Richard Pettibone. The ensemble of historic works on show, produced between 1964 and 1975, includes small-format silkscreens (around ten centimetres square) that duplicate the famous Pop Art works of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Each is a unique edition mounted on a stretcher fashioned by Pettibone himself! However if the artist plays with the idea of ‘cloning’, his works also constitute an archive of the art of his times in miniature. They can be seen as “copies of copies”, which consecrate Warhol’s kitsch wallpapers (Flowers, 1968) and cult canned foods (Heinz Tomato Soup, 1966), as well as Lichtenstein’s comic strip-inspired iconography (Fastest Gun, 1965) and its tribute to mainstream culture in the Sixties.