Pensato is recognized for combining the historical strategies of gestural abstraction with the iconic quality of pop art in ways that complicate the legacies of both styles. Her best known works are dynamic canvases, rendered primarily with energetic and exuberant layers of black and white, silver and gold enamel. However, her output was exponentially more wide-ranging, since all materials Pensato came across became part of her artistic world, manifesting as drawing, photo and installation.

Joyce Pensato examines the evolution of recurring motifs and characters in the artist’s work over the course of five decades, from her early Batman drawings from 1976 and vividly colored gestural abstraction rendered in oil from the 1980s, to her first enamel paintings in the early 1990s — gathering the most substantial group of works from this period to date — alongside her works from the early 2000s to 2019. Together, they trace the relationship of Pensato’s imagery to iconic cartoon and live-action figures from the 20th and 21st Century—ranging from Depression-era early animations like Felix the Cat, to early animations of the Disney canon, to the late-night television characters of South Park from the early aughts. These characters serve as a reflection of both the history of American culture and the transformations of technology over the past century.

Setting the stage for this exploration, the exhibition opens with a concise survey of the artist’s depictions of Mickey Mouse, capturing the character’s transformation through technology, its manifold associations and profound psychological effect. Another installation of Pensato’s “Eyes”—cropped from Barney the Dinosaur, South Park’s Stan, among others—demonstrates the potent gaze of the characters in her work, and makes literal the viewers’ relationship to popular figures. A grouping of “Batman” paintings, which the artist created over a period of five years—demonstrate the monumentality of Pensato’s vision, and reflect the occasional ambivalence of her embrace of popular culture.

Joyce Pensato is accompanied by a major exhibition catalogue, featuring new scholarly essays and photography. The catalogue contextualizes and situates Pensato’s work in the historical narratives of postwar abstraction and its reverberations in the 1980s and 1990s and documents her influence on younger generations of artists and contemporary discourses.