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52 Walker is pleased to announce its “sixteenth-and-a-half” exhibition, which will feature drawings by Raymond Pettibon related to his lifelong interest in professional wrestling. Organized by Ebony L. Haynes, this twoweek-only presentation—part exhibition, part event—will also see Pettibon’s friend and former two-time AEW (All Elite Wrestling) TNT Champion Darby Allin perform in live wrestling matches occurring on October 3 and 10 inside a ring installed within the gallery during the run of the show. Each performance night will also include live music and undercard bouts, organized by Allin, spotlighting up-and-coming figures in the sport. On view alongside Pettibon’s works will be drawings and wrestling props created by artist, designer, and wrestling specialist Charlie Ramone, who is widely known in the sport for his pivotal behind-the-scenes roles.
The show’s title, “Hardway,” refers to when a wrestler gets busted open by accident. It could be a stray punch to the head that causes a gash, a slice from a broken piece of a weapon, or anything that causes accidental bleeding. More often than not, a hardway injury is gruesome, shocking, and unsettling because it’s real. This rupture—where the performative nature of the match is pierced by something raw and truly violent—speaks to the heart of this exhibition, as seen in the works of Pettibon and Ramone and the matches featuring Allin, who has made his name in the sport for his extreme and often risky maneuvers.
Just as a hardway injury disrupts the illusion of control in the ring, Pettibon’s representations of the sport take up its stylized characters and violence as a way to scrutinize and satirize American myths of masculinity, power, and spectacle. Across the exhibited works, deeper cultural tensions play out and intermingle, and boundaries between truth and falsehood, danger and safety, performance and reality become increasingly—and disconcertingly—blurred.
Pettibon’s drawings include scenes of wrestling matches and hand-to-hand combat, depictions of Greco-Roman sculptures, and compositions that foreground muscular male bodies alongside inscriptions that make explicit the often subtextual homoeroticism of such imagery. This exhibition gathers these alongside Ramone’s similarly expressive drawings and props—personal pop-punk and metal tributes to wrestling’s energy and subcultural roots. The handwritten texts in both artists’ work play off of wrestling’s pantomime and exaggerated visual language, echoing Roland Barthes’s observation that “wrestling is like a diacritic writing,” in which gesture and posture annotate the body’s meaning.
Allin’s and the other wrestlers’ visceral, high-risk matches give realworld embodiment to these concerns while enacting the rupture at the show’s heart. Showcasing the less mainstream side of the sport, their matches fuse the gritty, anti-establishment spirit of wrestling’s pre-commercial era with the self-aware, media-savvy edge of the contemporary performer, laying bare the fault lines where spectacle fractures into something more volatile—and more real.
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