Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of the Joyce Pensato Estate. The gallery will present two solo exhibitions at its Chelsea and Upper East Side locations including paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installation, some of which have never been exhibited before.
At the Upper East Side gallery, the focus of the exhibition will be drawings from 1976 of Batman and Spiderman. In 1973 Pensato started her art studies at the New York Studio School under the tutelage of Mercedes Matter. It was Matter who suggested that she need not be frustrated by filling the overall picture plane but find her own voice in which to inhabit it. “Since I loved pop culture and discarded things, I filled my studio full of debris.” One of these discarded items was a life-size Batman cardboard cut-out, woefully broken in half, that she dragged into her studio and began exploring the figure’s relationship with a chair, among other objects, in charcoal drawings.
At its Chelsea location, the gallery will present a selection of “eyeball” paintings, large-scale drawings, discrete sculptures, and “Fuggetabout It (Redux),” an iteration of her installation of her studio elements first shown at Petzel in 2012, at Lisson, London in 2014 and a smaller version at the inaugural exhibition “The Everywhere Studio” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2018. The New Yorker review of the 2012 at Petzel summed up the exhibition: “Other artists have emptied their studios into galleries, but none so fetchingly as Pensato on the occasion of a move from her Williamsburg digs of thirty-two years. Her big, fast, runny paintings of vestigial cartoon faces prove to have emerged amid great, spattered messes of paint cans, orphaned furniture, stapled-up photographs and ephemera and many, many distressed stuffed animals and effigies of characters from Disney.”