JOYCE PENSATO | PART TWO
“She was an artist who needed more time than others to find her voice and once she found it, she was an uninhibited true master of her iconography. ”
Joyce Pensato (1941–2019) lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at the New York Studio School. The artist was best known for her paintings and drawings which employed a familiar cast of cartoon characters, including Mickey and Minnie Mouse; Donald and Daisy Duck; Batman; Felix the Cat; Homer, Bart, Marge, and Lisa Simpson; and the characters Stan and Cartman from the series “South Park.” Pensato was committed to her 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 through her own Abstract Expressionist technique.
Friedrich Petzel is the founder of Petzel Gallery and has represented Pensato’s work since 2007. The gallery is currently presenting dual exhibitions of Pensato’s work at its Chelsea and Uptown locations.
Interview by Dan Golden
When did Joyce Pensato first come on your radar?
I first met Joyce through Thea Westreich, an art consultant who I worked for in my very first year in New York. I guess it was 1991 or 1992. We saw many drawings of Mickey, Donald, and such, and I didn’t get the vibe at all. I grew up in Cologne; the Disney characters were not what I was looking for with respect to fine art. My entire focus was on conceptual art, or better, post-conceptual art. American Fine Art was the gallery I had gravitated to in my first years here and that prohibited me from ‘seeing’ Joyce’s work. Charline von Heyl mentioned her numerous times over those years after she had moved to New York but, still, I wasn’t attuned. I’m quite embarrassed about having dismissed the work early on.
My obsession with Joyce started years later after I read a profile on her work in Art in America, which gestured spectacular reproductions. I believe I jumped into a cab that same day with my director, Sam Tsao, to visit the artist in her studio on Olive Street. We were literally knocked out of our socks by the power of her paintings, the drawings, and the entire Joyce Pensato experience. Not only did we ‘click’, but I tried to buy as many paintings and drawings as I could afford and asked her to join the gallery. It was a match made in heaven, love at second sight.
Joyce Pensato, SmackDown! Lisa, Charcoal and pastel on paper, 90 x 90 1/4 inches. 2018
Joyce Pensato, Fuggetabout It (Redux), Installation view, 2021
What was it about Joyce’s work that resonated with you?
Her freedom! She had worked in obscurity for so many years that I had the impression that she couldn’t care less about the art world circus. But I am still most impressed by how she ‘controlled’ an image on canvas. The seemingly random brush strokes are highly sophisticated movements; she only left splashes of paint where necessary, locking the image into the frame of the stretcher bar like an old master painter who had trained in composition for decades. Combined with her incredible sense of humor, the drawings and paintings resonate with me for their courage and grit.
I’m curious if you view Joyce’s work through the lens of art history—placing her perhaps at the intersection of something like post-Abstraction/Pop, or, do you consider her without any such descriptions? Perhaps more as purely a unique spirit and artist… or possibly both?
Certainly, Joyce has been influenced by Ab-Ex painting modalities. I can detect a Pop attitude in her imagery as well, but in spirit, Joyce is unique. She is an artist who needed more time than others to find her voice, and once she found it, she was an uninhibited true master of her iconography. Some pictures look angrier than others but the energy is phenomenal. I miss her coming into the gallery to see a show, yelling “this is fucking fantastic!”
How will you/Petzel be involved with the work of the Joyce Pensato Foundation?
Our job is to secure the legacy of Joyce's work. The US institutions have still not embraced her genius and I believe we have to work very hard to get a proper survey show organized in this country. It’s a truism for many decades that some quintessential American artists find their first larger audience elsewhere. For Joyce, it was with European and Asian institutions. The foundation, and my gallery, will help to create a database, a catalog raisonnée for future generations to be able to locate loans and study the work. Joyce wanted her foundation to give out small grants to artists who have a hard time getting their voices heard. But most importantly we want to keep Joyce’s work alive! That’s what she wanted, staying alive and relevant.
Joyce Pensato, Fuggetabout It (Redux), Installation view, 2021
Joyce Pensato, Fuggetabout It (Redux), Installation view, 2021
Joyce Pensato, Sing Song Eyes, Enamel on linen, 74 x 52 inches, 2016
Joyce Pensato, Eyes Wide Open, Enamel on linen, 72 x 52 inches, 2016
You’ve just opened two exhibitions of Pensato’s work which include a range of works in different media. How do you approach installing these shows, especially the installations?
In Chelsea, we tried to install her studio to give the audience a ‘feel’ for Pensato’s process, the environment that she needed to make the paintings and drawings. The installations were carefully registered, documented, and photographed in her studio over the last eighteen months and can be set up by anyone else in the future. Before she passed, she authorized some of the installations to be autonomous artworks, many other ‘stations’ will go back into the crates and can be reconstituted elsewhere when required. We also isolated paintings that all focus on her eyeball images, twenty-plus years of pictures dealing with a relatively simple premise: how to make a semi-abstract picture that looks back at you. We didn’t want to assume the responsibility of a museum show, where Joyce’s entire iconography can be viewed. But that said, someone else can do a show with Donald paintings, or Batmans or juxtapose all the cartoon characters with one another. I don’t see that as being our job at this time. Uptown we are showing a wonderful group of early drawings from the 1970s that have (most likely) never been seen in New York.
Can you share an anecdote/memory of Joyce that resonates with you?
I’m still not over the fact that she’s no longer with us and I probably need to be quiet about those moments. It’s been a hard time to make this exhibition without her and her second most lovely mantra ”Fuhgeddaboudit”…
Joyce Pensato, The Look Back, Enamel on linen, 72 x 64 inches, 2016
Feature Portrait: Joyce Pensato in her studio in Brooklyn, NY in 2018. Photo: Elizabeth Ferry.
Fuggetabout It (Redux) January 15—February 27, 2021, Petzel Chelsea, 456 West 18th Street
Batman vs. Spiderman January 15—February 27, 2021, Petzel Uptown, 35 E 67th Street, New York