From her home base in Brooklyn, Joyce Pensato has spent the last four decades crafting an utterly unique approach to painting and drawing. With nods to the vigorous action of abstract expressionist painters, she has systematically attacked a specific set of pop culture icons, including Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Batman, various members of the Simpsons family, Donald Duck, Groucho Marx, and several species of clown. Working on increasingly large scale canvases, she initially worked in black lines on a white background, eventually flipping the scheme and working in white lines on black, and more recently introducing metallic (silver, gold) and spare flashes of color. The paintings are incredibly confident, with many layers accumulated over time, often featuring the drips and splatters of an explosive and joyful practice. Thoroughly uncompromising, the images sometimes carry dark connotations, a banal figure disabused of its superficial lightness, pummeled repeatedly until confessing sinister secrets, passages of red, yellow, and blue poking through the hardscrabble charcoal. Pensato’s drawings are equally brutal, erasure every bit as much an integral part of her technique as actual mark-making. On view at CvsD will be seven brand new drawings, including a large Donald Duck, and eight new canvases, including a series of five eye paintings which feature disembodied eyeballs in a field of paint. Pensato’s work has been shown internationally, including I Killed Kenny , a 2014 exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. In conjunction with The Godmother , Corbett vs. Dempsey has produced a full-color catalog, available at the opening.
Contributor: John Corbett
Publisher: Corbett vs Dempsey, 2017
Language: English
Softcover: 24 pages
10 x 7.5 in
ISBN 978-0-9974995-6-8
About the artist
Joyce Pensato (b. 1941, Brooklyn, NY, d. 2019, New York, NY)
Joyce Pensato lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York and studied at the New York Studio School. In her work, she was committed to depicting a baleful transmutation of American cartoon culture—employing her fast, assured, and gestural hand—to shed light on the arguable darkness lurking within our familiar Pop iconography. She was best known for her large-scale paintings which employed a familiar cast of cartoon characters, including Homer Simpson, Groucho Marx, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and a character the artist called “The Juicer.”
She received many awards in her lifetime including The Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize; The Award of Merit Medal for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Anonymous Was A Woman Award; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; New York Foundation for the Arts; and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.
Her work has been exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Innsbruck; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica; and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Saint Louis. Group exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; ICA Miami, Miami; Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Aalborg; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Speed Museum of Art, Louisville.
Pensato’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago; and FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France.
