Joyce Pensato

Born in Brooklyn/NY, lives and works in Brooklyn/NY

www.joycepensato.com





Galleries:
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Elga Wimmer PCC, New York




As the child of a Sicilian immigrant father and an Italian-American mother living in Brooklyn, Joyce Pensato was steeped in the rhythms of an ethnic neighborhood clinging to age-old traditions while absorbing the new, a neighborhood in which Catholic iconography and imagery abutted and melded with pop culture jetsam, and in which religious processions easily segued into street fairs and cheesy carnivals. Years later, Pensato radically transforms some of that pop-culture jetsam, in black and white paintings of iconic cartoon figures that have a marked psychological intensity and an arresting mix of both exuberance and unease.
   
While hardly nostalgic, many of Pensato’s paintings (notably of Mickey Mouse, who debuted in 1928, Donald Duck, who debuted in 1934, and Felix the Cat, who predates both to 1922) evoke a more innocent America at mid-century and before, and send that milieu careening into contemporary conflicts, anxieties, and desires, both personal and national. At first glance Pensato’s paintings, which include contemporary references to The Simpsons and South Park, look casual, perhaps dashed off in a few minutes, but that casual look was patiently achieved, and the complex behavior of paint is a key to the work. Gradations of thickness, splatters, tangential mini-streaks that jet at odd angles, and borders that fray into particles and gaps occur in a painterly style that freely mixes abstraction and representation. Pensato’s portraits of cartoon figures, rendered with a mix of wildness and precision, are intricately human - imbued with our ridiculousness and profundity, our ungainliness and grace - yet they also respond to the country in this era of uncertainty and crisis. For Carnival Within, Pensato presents a temporary wallwork, painted on site, which involves her idiosyncratic and spectacular versions of clowns.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2009: Joyce Pensato, Capitain Petzel, Berlin
2008–09: Joyce Pensato, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
2007: Joyce Pensato: Recent Drawings, Schmidt Contemporary Art, St. Louis/MO

Bibliography:
Jerry Saltz, “Emerging, After All These Years,”
in New York Magazine, February 4, 2008
Gregory Volk, “In the Neighborhood: Joyce Pensato’s Recent Paintings,” in The Eraser, exh. cat. Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York 2007
Stephen Maine, “Toon Noir,” in Art in America, June/July 2007