Born in 1938, Richard Pettibone is an East Coast American artist who has been exhibiting since the mid-sixties. His work explores the concept of 'appropriation'; a theme which has played an important role in the Pop Art movement.

In the early sixties Pettibone made works after Warhol, Stella, Lichenstein and Duchamp. His work takes the idea of 'appropriation' to the extreme and deals with issues of originality and repetition. He refers to his paintings as 'copies' although they are not exact replicas. Much of his work is small in scale due to the fact that the images he uses as reference are reproductions found in art magazines. This use of scale along with other subtle changes emphasises Pettibone's way of making art. These changes are more evident in his more recent work which is less true to the 'originals' than it was during the sixties. This is a natural progression for Pettibone as he continues to explore the images that others have created.