Richard Pettibone

Richard Pettibone was born on January 5, 1938, in Alhambra, California. He earned an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1959 and went on to complete an MFA in painting at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1962. By the mid-1960s he had begun producing small, precise replicas of works by contemporary artists, a practice that would define his career.

His first solo exhibition was held at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1965, and in 1969 he had a solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, the same dealer who represented several of the artists whose work Pettibone was replicating. Over the following decades he had numerous solo exhibitions, primarily at commercial galleries. His career received sustained institutional attention in the 2000s: a 2005 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and a co-organized traveling retrospective at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and the Laguna Art Museum spanning 2005 to 2006, presenting a broad survey of his work across four decades. In 2007 his work was included in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "What Is Painting?"

Pettibone lived and worked in New York State in his later years, including at his home in Charlotteville, New York. He died on August 19, 2024, in Cobleskill, New York, at the age of 86. According to his wife, as reported by The New York Times, his death followed complications from a fall at home while he was recovering from hip replacement surgery.

Institutions have consistently framed Pettibone as a pioneer rather than a footnote. The FLAG Art Foundation has described him as a prominent figure across Pop, post-Pop, and appropriation art, and museum texts from the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Laguna Art Museum situate his miniature recreations as a direct forerunner of the appropriation art movement that emerged in the 1980s. His inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 2007 survey "What Is Painting?" placed his practice within a broader institutional conversation about the nature of painting itself. No exact, attributable quotations from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile, so none are reproduced here.

Pettibone's auction record is USD 688,000, paid for the painting Saturday Disaster, Train Wreck, and others at Christie's New York on November 16, 2006. That price has held as his highest recorded sale through mid-2026, according to Artsy, MutualArt, and Heritage Auctions market data, with no higher sale reported in the years since. Outside that single record, his auction results are typically far lower, generally in the low six figures or less, based on listings across Artnet, LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, and Dorotheum.

Pettibone's market is thin and uneven: a single 2006 sale at Christie's accounts for his auction high, and results outside that sale are modest and infrequent, so any one data point should be read with caution rather than as a market trend. No catalogue raisonne has been identified, and since his death in 2024 his work continues to be shown and sold through Castelli Gallery in New York and Timothy Taylor in London, which organized a 2026 exhibition in connection with the Pettibone Estate, as well as through Surovek Gallery in Palm Beach. His presence in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, and other major institutions remains the strongest signal of his durability as a historically significant artist.