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Richard Pettibone
Leo Castelli
18 East 77th Street, Manhattan
Through Dec. 23

Richard Pettibone has forged a singularly interesting career by copying in miniature what other, more famous artists have done. Copying other people's art may not in itself be highly original, but Mr. Pettibone has done it with such finely tuned wit and tenderly fastidious craft that his work comes to seem extraordinarily personal.

This show of small paintings dating from 1964 to 2004 includes some surprises: the baseball card-size, Photo Realist portrait of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, for example, and multipanel works that combine handmade reproductions of well-known paintings, apparently original abstract painting and images from motorcycle and porn magazines. There are also recent mysteriously dark views of an indoor swimming pool.

Mr. Pettibone's engagement with famous artworks remains the most persuasive aspect of his enterprise. His loving, diminutive recreations of Marcel Duchamp's early Cubist masterpiece "La Marie," Frank Stella's black pinstripe paintings and Roy Lichtenstein's black-and-white image of a cigarette with a long ash balanced on a table edge are more than just Oedipal reductions of powerful father figures. They are meditations on the quasi-religious iconography of modern art history and, by extension, of modern consciousness.

Mr. Pettibone never loses his sense of humility or humor. Among several paintings featuring texts made of stick-on letters is one that reads, in part, "I saw the Borofsky show and I decided I should write more. I hope people don't think I'm copying him." KEN JOHNSON for the NYT 12/11/04


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