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.

June 21 to July 31, 2015
299 Grand Street (between Eldridge and Allen streets)
New York, 212 510 7646

Marc Straus’s recently closed summer group show, “Gray Would Be the Color, If I Had a Heart,” showcased nearly 30 artists, spread through three galleries on two floors. Each artwork was rendered primarily in grayscale and the show went far beyond grisaille studies, including gelatin silver photographs, drawings, prints, and sculptures. That kind of excess is, although not ideal, pretty much to be expected with a lot of summer group shows. “Gray…” exceeded many similar exhibitions in its more-or-less consistent tone; and it basically achieved its aim of selecting works intended to be, as the press release puts it, “Not completely hopeless. Not utterly bleak. Not fully shrouded in darkness.” The maudlin grimness, which is supposed to be tinged with optimism, is excessive, too. But there were some really great artworks, silver lining or no.

Kind of surprisingly, few of them were monochromes. Although the show celebrates gray, it doesn’t remain there alone, and it recognizes that the color itself is broad: cool grays, warm ones, dark, light, tinted with pink, or blue, brown, orange, nothing at all, reflective, matte, symbolic or concrete, and so on.

There are contrasts from the start: near the gallery’s entrance is a photocollage diptych by VALIE EXPORT, showing a woman’s face towering over and observing a hypnagogic modernist cityscape, set next to two small assemblages by Kristjan Gudmundsson, made by adhering mechanical pencil leads in ordered rows on sheets of aluminum. In a nearby corner of the gallery, Rona Pondick’s man-headed dog sculpture, Fox (1998 – 99), recalls sci-fi horror from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Mars Attacks! It uses an image variously intended as horrific or absurd. One realizes that chimeras — aesthetic, biological, conceptual, whatever — are usually both.

Here also hangs a totemic punching bag by Jeffrey Gibson, a tight drawing by Joyce Pensato and Matt Ducklo’s South Parkway East Church (2011), a black-and-white photo of a small bus, used by a Memphis church, locked behind a chain-link pen in the middle of an empty parking lot at night. Like a lot of the work here, these simple, spare images are iconic and direct.

Upstairs, the show doesn’t hang quite so neatly together, or at least some of the works in it fall flat. Diana Shpungin’s A Failure of Memory (2015) suffers from a bland execution, as does Grayson Cox’s Vent (2015). The artists’ material choices are unclear: why is Shpungin’s wastebasket cut so loosely in half? Why are the shorn edges lined with plaster-cast material? Why is Cox’s painting framed in a large plywood casing? Why does the frame look so unfinished compared to the naturalism of the painting embedded within it at an angle?

Although Zlatan Vehabovic’s image of a large, dead whale, called Rock Bottom Riser (2014), is painted fussily, the image has deep roots in Dutch printmaking, and it’s a powerful one: a morbid leviathan. One reason that the icon is so common, besides its allegorical value, is because its one that recurs under human guidance. Whales have been threatened for centuries, first by large-scale hunting, and now by climactic catastrophe. Two works by Sam Trioli, hung side-by-side — Harry S. Truman (2014) and Untitled (Vibrations) from 2013 — show in photorealistic detail the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, and the man who ordered such weapons dropped on Japan 70 years ago. These, at least, are utterly bleak.

Also upstairs is a small and reserved etching by Jasper Johns: an image of one of his pewter-colored flashlight sculptures, titled Flashlight (1967 – 69). Johns was a gray eminence who sort of inspired the much-remarked on work of another of the color’s most famous painters, Brice Marden, whose early monochromes likely subsequently influence some of the other artists on view, such as Jessica Dickinson, Geoff Hippenstiel and Jim Lee. These artists are still exploring the marriage of surface, color and image. And for whatever reason (there are probably several that the artists would cite) gray is a good way to do that.

Finally, Dove Bradshaw’s 2013 painting, Contingency (Snow Tracks), shows a really concrete, absolute way to think about color’s use in art. Bradshaw made the painting by applying liver of sulfur to a silver-coated canvas (the former substance reacts to patinate the latter). Her technique here and in other works uses chance-based methods — developed by Johns’s friends Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and John Cage — in order to create images rooted in the precise relationship of one chemical to another. There’s nothing more factual than that. It’s not morose or bright, just true. Another fact is that this show had a lot of interesting work, a mélange. I don’t know about anyone else’s heart, but mine is there: it’s a gray fact.

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Katherine Bradford: New Work at Edward Thorp Gallery
April 19 to June 9, 2012
210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th Floor, between 24th and 25th streets
New York City,  212-691-6565

The First Great Depression bequeathed the common culture a pantheon of superheroes now making a spectacular “comeback” – although of course they never went away – in the Second. But as Hollywood slicks up the golems of yesteryear in new layers of spandex, visual artists have a different take on these valiant personages.  In 2012, in two remarkable shows, Superman and Batman stormed Gotham’s gallery scene.

Batman arrived at Frederick Petzel Gallery in January on the cape tails of Joyce Pensato. This artist’s trademark idiom, established over a long career, is the full-blown, angst and splatter rendering of cartoon characters, a style that not only simultaneously critiques and renews Abstract Expressionism but also recalls the shared roots of DC Comics and the New York School.

Superman stars in a show from an artist of the same age as Pensato but, thanks to a late start and contrasting outlook, a totally different generation: Katherine Bradford.  Where the dark knight gets bombast, the man of steel’s ascent is fuelled by fey sweetness.

Indeed, Bradford delivers an oxymoronically saftig übermensch.  But the deflated catsuit and soft limbs are in no way meant to imply an antihero: he is simply a cuddly hero.  Nor in his middle age spread should he be misread as a mere mortal in a rented Halloween costume, a figure – in other words – of bathos. His astral travels are for real as he ascends upon a schematic spiral or hovers in the night sky.  His depiction is of a piece with an overall paint handling that has the angst-free awkwardness of outsider art.  Like the best of naïve painting, only in her case knowingly hard won, Bradford’s images are shot through with effortless abstract harmony and disconcerting observational acumen. The hero’s buttocks and thighs in Superman Responds (2011), for instance, are conveyed by a few loose, carefree-seeming dabs of electric crimson and ultramarine against a generalized creamy ground that nonetheless get across with anatomical precision a convincing if gender-bent voluptuousness.

Everything Bradford paints is shot through with humor: sometimes whimsical, sometimes poignant, sometimes earthy and raucous, other times ethereal, but tellingly, never ironic. Superman as wimp could so easily be a satire of something: masculinity, militarism, even Painting with a capital P.  But Bradford invests the two motifs in her show – the other being ocean liners – with such warmth and evident personal significance as to defeat any such end.

These paintings are big and intimate.  Big in energy, implied scale, the busy way worked surfaces and agitated depths connote imagery found in decisions and revisions.  Intimate in the localness of color contrasts, the rapport with surface, the unfussy finesse of loved details—albeit ones modestly veiled with the appearance of chance discoveries and happy accidents.  This collision of gestures that are at once bold and poignant is what gives Bradford’s work its essential character, its tension.

She is one of those very contemporary artists intent on having her cake and eating it.  There is the peculiar poetic charm of provisional painting – a sense of blah, of nonchalance, of not quite caring about the slapdash, scruffy, Brooklyn-esque “work in progress” look. But, on the other hand, there is also the energy, seriousness, and resolve of classic abstract painting.  The happy marriage of naïveté and abstraction can feel at times as if a Chagall, Janice Biala or Aristodimos Kaldis has been pressed through a de Kooning sieve.  Actually, forget that messy analogy: just recall that Wassily Kandinsky made naïve woodcuts before he invented abstraction. Or else bring to mind the reverse, high-abstraction-to-low-realism trajectory of Philip Guston.

Guston is indeed the logical port of call for anyone making sense of Bradford’s journey to action heroes and cruise ships.  A very late starter, she had begun in abstraction when, in the course of her development, she felt a painterly, rather than existential, need for subject matter.  But ocean liners and Superman, at least as she treats them, are, on two counts, the opposite of Guston’s Klansmen, cigarette stubs, or old boots: her romantic, heartfelt subjects are neither quotidian nor dark.  Similarly, The Moon and Sixpence meets A Doll’s House scenario suggested by her delayed career launch is belied by her anything-but-outsider status as an artist.  Bradford is little short of a cultural heroine to a younger generation of Brooklyn painters making up the phenomenal attendance of her lecture at the New York Studio School earlier this season and the opening of the exhibition under review.

As I say, Bradford’s Superman and her ships are non-ironic and non-satirical, but clearly, the limp action hero and the capsized liner somehow battling on are powerful, fecund symbols of vulnerable strength and strength in vulnerability.  Found in the process of abstract painting, could they in fact be symbols of that very art historical legacy she treasures but also deconstructs: ciphers for painterly explorations that are personal and collective, provisional and heroic, their grandeur grander for being – literally, in her scumble and pentimenti – faded?

This would bridge the gap between the bulky ships at sea and the hero zipping through the sky. It would draw stray images in this compelling show into a gently suggestive lost-and-found narrative of danger and adventure: a Madame-X-like Lady Liberty (2011); a collage featuring the doomed aviatrix Amelia Earhart (2011-12); the silhouette of a ship against a pink sea and orange sky in S.O.S (2012).

Maybe it could even make sense of the cryptic (though neither Kryptonian nor marine) New Men (2011), a mirrored, quasi-palindrome arrangement of the words of its title.  In her lecture, in reference to this work, Bradford alluded to an appreciation of the strong sensitive men  she was starting to notice around her –  bearded Brooklyn Rail-reading metrosexuals flooded this audience member’s mind – perhaps, indeed, the very courtiers of the new order who throng her events.

All I can say is that Bradford is my personal discovery (so far) for 2012.  She makes me optimistic about the future of painting.  I left her show a new man.

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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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