A cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. In the 1990s, Pettibon extended his work onto the walls in large scale installations and more recently he has been working in video animation.   Pettibon’s obsessive drawings pull freely from a range of sources including music, politics, religion, art history, sex, sports, movies, and comic books. His mostly monochromatic drawings and animations frequently employ lyrically ambiguous texts in which he is as likely to explore the subject of surfing as he is typography. Themes from art history and nineteenth-century literature appear in the same breath with American politics from the 1960s and contemporary pop culture. Citing such muses as Henry James, Mickey Spillane, Marcel Proust, William Blake, and Samuel Beckett, his thematic range is highly topical, addressing current political concerns while exploring the universal human need for something to believe in.