With his mini-reproductions of significant works of art since the 1960s, Richard Pettibone (born 1938 in Alhambra, California) is considered a pioneer of Appropriation Art. He made the appropriation of images his own long before it became a common artistic practice in the 1980s. Pettibone copied paintings by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein or Ed Ruscha as well as works by Marcel Duchamp or Piet Mondrian. His "reductions", as Pettibone calls them, differ from their "pre-images" in their greatly reduced size and subtle modifications, such as colour or material changes. Oscillating between original and reproduction, questions about the authorship of works and ideas open up, not without including the commercialisation of art, the art market and the role of the artist in the discourse.
Major exhibition houses, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach; and the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum), Pasadena have presented solo exhibitions of Pettibone
