C O U N T Y

Classical Elements

John Newsom & Raymond Pettibon

March 15 - 30, 2022

COUNTY is pleased to present Classical Elements, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Raymond Pettibon and John Newsom.

Classical Elements is inspired by earth, air, water, fire, and aether, the five basic substances which Aristotle believed produced all others. For this exhibition, Raymond Pettibon and John Newsom have both pared down their art to its most elemental level. Pettibon, whose immersive installations sometimes contain hundreds of individual works on paper, has restricted himself to just five. And Newsom, who typically works at a monumental scale, has chosen to paint on two-foot wooden panels as an homage to medieval icon paintings. Resolutely understated, the ten works in Classical Elements invite us to approach closely and contemplate them acutely.

Raymond Pettibon is an “enigmatic, fantastically erudite artist,” as Peter Schjeldahl wrote in his New Yorker review. For this show, Pettibon pairs intriguingly ambiguous images, representing each element, with texts appropriated from such sources as the Book of Exodus and Henry James. “I go to great lengths to distill the Word into a scant few lines,” says Pettibon. Austere in presentation, the works lend themselves to multiple interpretations and benefit from a very slow read.

Similarly, John Newsom’s compositions, which use pattern and texture as metaphor, benefit from sustained visual engagement. At first glance, his paintings appear naturalistic, but the longer we spend with them, the more we begin to notice their subtle surrealism. A falcon’s beak transforms into gold. The curl of a chameleon’s tail creates a portal to the stars. Taking Aristotle’s elements as his point of departure, Newsom finds supernatural wonderment in the natural world.

Classical Elements is a nuanced meditation on the elements of nature and art by two artists who want us to slow down and discover our own ideas through the generative process of looking and reading. Two artists, five elements, infinite meanings.

 John Newsom is an American artist best known for combining multiple techniques of formal painting strategies on large-scale canvases featuring dynamic spectacles of the natural world. In 2022, Newsom was the subject of a major retrospective, John Newsom: Nature’s Course, which is currently on view at Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, OK, near where the artist grew up. Other early-career survey exhibitions of his work have been presented at notable institutions, including The Richard J. Massey Foundation for the Arts and Sciences in New York, 2011-2012, as well as MANA Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ, in 2015. Newsom has exhibited extensively in The United States and Europe, as well as Japan. Articles and reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and The New York Times. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hammer Museum, The San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, The Neuberger Museum of Art, The R.I.S.D. Museum, and The Yale University Art Gallery. In a 2015 monograph of Newsom’s paintings, the art critic Barry Schwabsky writes: “Beneath his thick and sensuous painted renderings of flora and fauna is a grappling with the giants of abstraction.” Newsom lives and works in New York.

Raymond Pettibon’s influential oeuvre engages a wide spectrum of American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, religion, politics, sports, and alternative youth culture, among other sources. Pettibon’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2019-2020. Daumier – Pettibon, a significant presentation of Pettibon’s art paired with the work of the renowned nineteenth-century artist, was presented at the Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland, in 2019. A Pen of All Work, a major solo exhibition of Pettibon’s work featuring more than seven hundred drawings from the 1960s to the present, was on view in 2017 at the New Museum, marking the artist’s first museum survey in New York. Prominent venues that have held solo exhibitions of the artist’s work include the Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn, Estonia (2015); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2012); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2007); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, California (2005); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005). Additionally, Pettibon has been a part of the Istanbul Biennial (2011); Liverpool Biennial (2010); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2010 and 2004); Venice Biennale (2007 and 1999); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004, 1997, 1993, and 1991); and documenta XI, Kassel, Germany (2002). Museum collections that hold works by the artist include the Baltimore Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Pettibon lives and works in New York.

Logan R. Beitmen