Joyce Pensato at Petzel Gallery

Fuggetabout It (Redux)
January 15 to February 27, 2021
456 West 18th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues
New York City, petzel.com

Batman vs. Spiderman
January 15 to March 20,
35 East 65th Street, between Madison and Park avenues
New York City, petzel.com

Joyce Pensato’s 2012 exhibition, Batman Returns, although her third at Petzel Gallery, was greeted by the New York art world with astonishment.  At its core was a large-scale installation titled Fuggetabout It. The gallery was transformed into a simulacrum of Pensato’s work space: toys, posters, photographs, empty paint cans, old furniture, and used paint brushes cohabited with her explosive paintings of pop-culture icons. After more than 30 years in her Williamsburg studio, Pensato had lost a legal battle with her landlord and was forced to vacate. She had literally ripped out pieces of her studio walls and installed them in a pristine white-box gallery. It was funny, alarming, and bold.

Petzel Gallery, which manages the artist’s estate (she died in 2019) has mounted a brilliant exhibition that partially recreates the 2012 installation while adding drawings and paintings not in the original show that amplify the artist’s singular vision.

Fuggetabout It (Redux) situates studio detritus seductively in the entry way while placing a huge drawing of a child’s toy, Daisy (2012), in the first gallery, as if to welcome visitors with arms extended. Vigorous gestures in charcoal and pastel swirl around the figure, both defining it and bursting out of its sides. There is palpable delight in the artist’s mark making as layer upon layer of charcoal is repeatedly applied, erased, and applied again, revealing the drawing’s rich and tactile history. In some places, Pensato erased so aggressively that she went right through the paper. The energy is electric. Both the artist and her subjects seem very much in charge. Though she grins a seemingly friendly smile, the monumental roly-poly Daisy could rip you apart.

Daisy is joined in the first room by Underground Homer and Smackdown Lisa, two characters from The Simpsons that were perennial Pensato subjects. The trio is a canny introduction to the rest of the exhibition. The next room houses much of the reconfigured Fuggetabout It installation, a mad tangle of objects on tables, chairs, the floor—all covered in drips and blobs of Pensato’s paint of choice, black and white commercial grade enamel. It takes a moment to readjust your focus as you are drawn into this compact universe. Stuffed animals, a life-sized cardboard cutout of Muhammad Ali, furniture, a fake palm tree, and dozens upon dozens of paint cans and brushes, milk crates, and rags. It’s a whirlwind of paint and objects, both fun and startling. I watched gallery visitors take a step back at the entryway of the room, alarmed that they had, perhaps stumbled into a hoarder’s den. Installed so that visitors can walk around, peer under and over the tableaux, it’s a maximalist’s dream come true.

As we absorb this past view of Pensato’s work, it is important to consider how far she traveled. As a student at the New York Studio School in the 1970s, she aspired to be an Abstract Expressionist. According to her own account and those of her peers, she struggled to find her voice and artistic acceptance. Her ambition undiminished, she turned to pop culture for her iconography, but without abandoning her AbEx roots. The extraordinary energy of her gestural painting and drawing relates directly to the work of Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner and Franz Kline. But while the grit and passion remain expressionist, the iconography is unabashedly pop.

Despite the power and skill of Pensato’s drawing, her use of pop culture sources was seen by some as a gimmick. But a concurrent exhibition at the uptown Petzel Gallery centered solely on the artist’s deep dive into Batman and Spiderman show the extent to which her disciplined and focused work deconstructs and reconfigures these all-familiar superheroes to take full artistic ownership of them.

The third room at the Chelsea exhibition is where the brilliance of both her career and the installation of this show are most fully realized. A clean white room is hung with large portraits of the eyes—and only the eyes—of Pensato’s subjects. In stark black and white, these giant paintings walk the line between representation and abstraction. Informed by Pensato’s drawings and the installation, we know that these are the eyes of Homer and Lisa Simpson, Batman, South Park’s Eric Cartman and other such figures. But at the same time, they read as pure explorations of form, texture and material. Pensato has distilled recognizable traits to their essence. They are convincing portraits and galvanizing abstraction, exemplary as both.

The post A Blizzard of Paint and Objects: Joyce Pensato Makes Pop Culture Her Own appeared first on artcritical.

At Petzel, Thomas Eggerer presents a single, large painting. Called Waterworld (2015), it’s composed of a rolling expanse of water seen from a high, raking vantage, with no horizon and no shore. Punctuated with a single breaking wave, the image is populated with hundreds of small, identical figures, all white men, in various postures of restrained enjoyment. They paddle on floating things, dip into the brine, wade, stand in blank contemplation, without interacting. Their repetition is reminiscent of artists like Hieronymus Bosch or Thomas Bayrle, but rendered with a televisual superficiality that is evocative without being specific, making it especially haunting. One might also think of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), which also featured a flat, blue expanse, and Jarman’s reminiscences about his progressive blindness, his coming death, and friends and lovers lost to AIDS, memories of romantic beaches, as well as the start of a new year and the cyclical nature of time. The image is spooky, awesome, and not a little sad.

On view through February 20 at Petzel, 456 W. 18th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues, New York, 212 680 9467.

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September 10 to October 24, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

In her exhibition eight years ago at Zach Feuer gallery, Dana Schutz showed a series of “How We Would…” paintings – fantasies of accomplishment or desire. Especially striking was How We Would Give Birth (2007), which depicted a woman on a bed distracting herself by staring at a Hudson River School painting on the wall while a bloody infant struggles to emerge from her open womb. This painting came to mind while confronting twelve huge exuberant paintings (one close to 10 by 20 feet) and four drawings in her present show at Petzel, and realizing all but one were done in the past several months of 2015 after the birth of her child, a little more than a year ago.

While usually her paintings look out at a world gone wild, most of these paintings seem to gaze inward. Schutz’s images have always seemed like proscenia, upon which are enacted the dramatic complexity of her own ambivalent feelings. And in this spirit we might consider the animating engine of her current exhibition to be Post-partum Expression. Whatever her fantasy of parenthood might have been eight years ago, these paintings are the palpable result.

The human-scaled Sleepwalker (2015) in Petzel’s entryway guides us into the exhibit. It displays a person in a yellow t-shirt, hands outstretched zombie-like, having just descended, or ascended, or about to tumble down (the perspective is ambiguous) a long flight of stairs. The vision is reminiscent of those post-childbirth, middle-of-the-night walks to quiet a crying infant: trying to be awake just enough to accomplish the task, yet still able to fall back to sleep afterwards. Ironically, the “Adidas” emblazoned across her chest has its final “s” obscured or missing to become Adida, the past participle of the Spanish verb adir — to accept.

Acceptance of the present moment, of chaos and loss of control, is not only a condition of parenthood, but of painting, as well. Some of these images might seem incoherent at first, but the confusing, fractured, and contradictory points of view of Cubist space, which frustrates stable analysis, seems to have become the ideal tool for Schutz to explore her emotional state.

Lion Eating Its Tamer (2015) introduces us to this ravaged pictorial space where every brushstroke simultaneously creates form and is a form itself. Being consumed by what one is trying to control calls to mind the experience of being physically and emotionally devoured by one’s child, probably every nursing mother’s nightmare. The lion is an implacably ferocious stone idol upon whose altar the tamer has been sacrificed. The various objects contained in this flattened image — a ball, a sperm-like whip, a ring of milky flames, a nipple shaped pedestal, a purple streaked square of paper or diaper, a broken wooden joint and nails — are arranged around the central action like iconographs in a Byzantine Madonna and Child painting. The tamer seems less terrified than resigned or sleep-deprived, engulfed by, or perhaps ejected from, the mouth/womb of the chimeric beast. The drama is staged not in a circus ring but on a trapezoidal examination table under overhead surgical lighting.

A yet more mysterious painting, The Glider (2015) is as bewildering as any Cubist Pablo Picasso, and at first the central female’s face seems pulled from one of his paintings. Learning that this glider is not an airborne one, but the term for a reclining nursing chair clarifies the image. The wood chair, the red infant, elongated funnel breasts (there seems to be four), and various glasses with water and straws create a private moment that we share. The Picassoid face of the nursing mother, as fractured as it may seem, expresses a specific emotion somewhere between shock and ecstasy, and locates a head that is leaning back and seen from below, which would be the nursing infant’s point of view, and becomes our own, pulling us into this intimate experience.

This sense of introspection and privacy, despite the manic energy of their execution, extends even to the two titular paintings of the show with their metaphors of a brawl in the enclosed space of an elevator. The calm abstractions of flat brushed metal doors, either opening or closing like curtains on the intense energy of wildly painted forms at the center, separate us from the drama. The chaotic confrontations of a contained world are in the process of being concealed or revealed to our isolated view. The quite wonderful Slow Motion Shower far from a salacious view of a naked female bather offers a hunched over, multi-armed and possibly weeping Shiva, whose tears blend with the shower spray and conveys the feeling of a retreat from the demands of human contact and the one place to find solitude and release.

The immense Shaking Out the Bed (2015) in the last room depicts not only a locus of pleasure and conception (certainly not sleep here) but also a fraught arena for any new family. Initially so chaotic seeming, the painting slowly reveals how Schutz has structured this boudoir explosion.

Several different points of view here have been woven together. Seen frontally the stable entry point into this eruption, at the center bottom, is the dark surface of a night table. Upon it rests an ominous hammer, a water glass, a crumpled paper, and a giant cockroach. Anchoring the right side of the painting is the flat top of a headboard seen from above, displaying four ornamental ceramic pots. The upper part of the painting is held in place by a lamp on a blond night table, drawer expressionistically askew, and on the left side, looking down past the foot of the bed is a laundry basket possibly containing soiled diapers.

The “shaking out” of the title occurs in the center of the painting where coins, newspaper and pizza slice fly out at us like a big bang. Bang might be the operative word as it is generated by two figures caught in coitus, as evinced by their straining appendages and bare buttocks, and the concentrated expressions of their giant Philip Guston-like heads pressed intimately together, trying unsuccessfully not to disturb the diapered infant at the foot of the bed. Mostly we are looking down on this scene, which throws us into the air as well.

Schutz emphasizes how personally significant this painting must be for her, not only through the scale and the intimacy of the activity, but in the specificity of markers around the edge: the stack of Self magazines under the bed, the calendar page in one corner showing the date June 27, and the digital clock in another revealing the time to be 12:31.

Evident here is the influence of other artists who have explored the metaphoric significance of family experience, whether Guston, Elizabeth Murray, Nicole Eisenman or Judith Linhares, each in entirely different ways. But the boldness and fearlessness of Schutz’s approach, her constant risky experimentation with both form and subject matter, and an almost desperate desire to get to the bottom of her feelings through paint, reveal her, to my mind, as one of the great painters of our time. Julian Schnabel once bragged that he was the closest thing to Picasso we were going to get in our lifetime, but he’s now been pushed aside.

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January 8 through February 14, 2015
456 W 18th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 680 9467

Years ago I watched a puzzling documentary about a Billy Graham crusade in Brazil. A shot of a plane towing an advertisement for the event over a beach crowded with half-naked bodies left me wondering what attraction evangelical Christianity had in this land of exuberant physicality. Apparently plenty, as shown in Yael Bartana’s film Inferno, on view along with True Finn at Petzel in New York (January 8-February 15, 2015). Together, these works challenge conventional ideas of how people of a certain nationality are expected to behave.

On the border of fiction and documentary, Inferno (2013) re-enacts ancient Hebrew temple worship, using a full-scale replica of the Temple of Solomon created in Brazil by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). Worshippers dressed in white linen faux-biblical costume and led by a flamboyantly-attired Black high priest gather at the site. Helicopters swoop in to deliver an altar and giant golden menorah, similar to the one carried off by the Romans nearly two thousand years ago.

The devoted flock that arrived with goats and chickens to offer to God soon discover that they are to be the sacrifice. Suddenly the Temple is engulfed in flame, killing most of the participants. After the conflagration, the film re-enacts modern times, where the faithful place notes in a replica of the ruined Temple wall while tourists sip cold drinks from menorah-emblazoned melons.

If Inferno tells the story of one culture planting another within its borders — a kind of Disneyland Jerusalem within Brazil — True Finn (2014) tells the story of people planting a culture within themselves. Created by Bartana for the Finnish contemporary art festival Ihme, this film records the results of a gathering arranged by the artist, in which she asked several naturalized Finnish citizens to discuss what it means to be a “true” Finn. The event takes place at a lakeside cabin in the north — a kind of “holy of holies” for Finnish culture.

In the process of the experience, Finns of Japanese, Estonian, Somali, Quebecois and Roma descent reveal basic problems of citizenship in the modern world. Discussing discrimination, one begins, “I feel like a Finn, I’ve lived here a long time, but when I go into a shop…” The group then enacts a scene of discrimination. Bartana further captures the ironies of outsider status by intermingling footage from classic films that embody national mythology. We see blond-haired, blue-eyed Finns in folk costume from the film Sampo (1959), and then cut to the darker-skinned Somali participant Mustafe wearing the same outfit. Later Mustafe dons Muslim garb as he offers daily prayers in the midst of the frozen lake.

Participants engage in typical Finnish activities: eating hearty stews and lingonberry sauce, ice fishing, sitting in the sauna. They cite adopted habits, e.g. “sulking” and “wearing black” as evidence that they have been integrated into the culture. They compose a new national anthem for their country and design a new flag, exchanging Finland’s severe dark blue cross for flowing bands of white, azure and green against a yellow background.

Bartana’s videos get to the heart of the problem of citizenship and culture in a democratic society. If, to become a part of a nation, one need only pledge allegiance to its laws, how can we say that one person more authentically of that place than another? If an Estonian, a Roma, and a Quebecois absorb the trappings of Finnish culture and learn to speak its language, shouldn’t Finland absorb them? And conversely, if a group in Brazil builds its own Jerusalem, how can we consider it less authentic than the one in the middle east?

The post A House of Prayer for All People: Yael Bartana at Petzel appeared first on artcritical.

January 24, 2014 at the National Academy Museum,  moderator David Cohen’s guests were Hrag Vartanian, co-founder and editor of the blogzine, Hyperallergic; Christina Kee, a regular contributor at artcritical; and Village Voice critic Christian Viveros-Faune.

The shows discussed were Allison Schulnik Eager at Zieher Smith, Thomas Bangsted at Marc Straus,  Wade Guyton at Petzel and Lori Ellison at McKenzie Fine Art.

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Please also join us for the next panel, on January 24, with Hrag Vartanian, Christina Kee and Christian Viveros-Faune.

The post December 2013: Becky Brown, Dennis Kardon and Raphael Rubinstein with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.

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Faye Hirsch, Franklin Einspruch, and Christina Kee, join David Cohen to review  Mary Corse at Lehmann Maupin,  Ridley Howard at Leo Koenig, Glenn Goldberg at Jason McCoy, and Joyce Pensato at Friedrich Petzel.

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Batman Returns, and so does color in this iconically chromophobe – or to accentuate the positive, rigorously restrictive – painter, usually, in black, white and silver.  Pensato started painting Batman in her no holds barred fast, masterfully goofy calligraphic idiom in the mid-1970s but the caped hero was thrust aside in the intervening years by such usurpers as Donald Duck and Homer, both of whom are still presences in this gutsy – almost literally! – display of painterly bravura.  Also new: detritus from the artist’s recently vacated studio.  Anyone who is still peddling the line that AbEx painting is inherently macho and remote from popular culture needs to take a careful look at Pensato: heiress equally to Pollock and Warhol and a fearless feminist to boot.

Joyce Pensato: Batman Returns is on view through February 25 at 537 West 22nd Street, Tel (212) 680-9467.

The exhibition will be discussed at The Review Panel at the National Academy Museum on February 24

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May 6- June 18th, 2011
537 West 22nd Street. between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212-680-9467

Sing in me, Sean Landers, and through me tell the story of a sad clown who weathered many bitter nights and days in his deep heart at sea.

Landers’s new exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, does not sing, nor is it particularly poetic or lyrical, though the narrative depicted could certainly be described as an epic.  Around the World Alone, presents a series of flatly stylized portraits of one of his alter-egos, the clown, on a solo-circumnavigation – a life-long voyage from boy to old man.

The clown appeared relatively early in the artist’s oeuvre, together with images of aliens, robots, monkeys, rabbits, and naked hippies, serving to liberate him from the widely popular text-based works for which he was known.  Though the texts were certainly solipsistic, they were highly entertaining and visually compelling, and when contemplating his subsequent style of deadpan affect and purposefully banal image presentation, one may occasionally ache for the challenge of deciphering hundreds of misspelled words chronicling ambition, insecurity, bawdiness, and witty self-reflection.

Clowns are problematic icons in popular culture, calling to mind Steven King’s Pennywise, The Joker, John Wayne Gacy, and any number of cheap jokes.  Artists Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman have tackled our discomfort head on by creating the creepiest of creepy clowns (Sherman) in unpleasant or vile circumstances (Nauman).  Landers embraces his anti-hero fully however, freeing him from the circus and sending him around the world as skipper of a disturbingly un-seaworthy and shape-shifting vessel.  He eschews the laws of physics and narrative continuity in this series – the captain’s wheel shrinks to flimsy inadequacy and expands to dwarf the helmsman. Though the artist is an experienced sailor, the details of the boat are purposefully wrong or missing; the jib is not tied to the boom, the gunwale appears to consist of carved wooden bannisters, the wheel sometimes faces the stern.  His brave avatar is far from land, in a deliberately inadequate craft.  The ocean is rendered more authentically – shifting from green to blue to calm to roiling – indicating that on some level this journey is real.  Despite the perceptual ambiguities and challenges present, this voyage is not entirely doomed.  In Around the World Alone (Force Ten Stalwart) Landers has equipped the ship with a compass, a life saver, and red and green port and starboard lights.  Around the World Alone (Arctic Endurance) depicts the threat of icebergs safely past – enigmatic menaces whose true mass is concealed beneath the surface, where what you don’t see coming can sink you.

The metaphor of solo embarkation is hardly a new one (remember Bas Jan Ader’s foolhardy and ultimately fatal quest) but though heavy-handed it is quite effective.  Landers may or may not aim for seriousness but he strives for a level of honesty and clarity– desiring always that the viewer recognize him or herself in his work.  This is not a tall order in Around the World Alone – who has not felt adrift in life, sabotaged by faulty equipment and at the mercy of the whims of weather and fate alike?  The artist’s deployment of the clown indicates that only a self-defined outsider or fool would deliberately take such a hazardous journey.  When considered in terms of Landers’s oeuvre however another level of interpretation presents itself – the artist felt that his clowns were neither understood nor accepted for a long time and in this series they heroically survive against nearly impossible odds.  The cast bronze heads of seafaring clowns at the exhibition’s entrance are positioned as if busts of famous nautical clown captains past.  In Landers’s own words, despite his experience, he is “an armchair sailor first and foremost” – he prefers to let the clowns have all the glory.

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