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LA artist Raymond Pettibon (born 1957) is now so well known for his blackly humorous hand-drawn chronicles of the American unconscious and the darker realms of the counter-culture, that it’s hard to believe his first solo exhibition – at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York – was as recently as 1994. In fact, it was amid the foment of the Los Angeles punk and hardcore scene of the late 1970s that Pettibon’s marvelous pen-and-ink drawings first found their audience: he was closely associated with Black Flag and the SST record label, designing album covers and logos for Black Flag (and later for Minutemen and Sonic Youth) and releasing many books of drawings – now extremely sought after – through SST. Although Pettibon’s art coincided with the birth of the LA punk scene, his irreverent conjunctions of text and image were well-suited to the themes and iconography of that movement. Raymond Pettibon: Front Row Center affirms the artist’s earliest audience and contexts by focusing on his used of music-related subject matter, his own music, his work with bands and record labels and his fascination with the utopian ideals and the sad demise of hippie and punk culture.