Joyce Pensato

Press Release

Opening reception: Friday, December 9th, 6-8pm

Corbett vs. Dempsey is proud to present its final show of 2016, The Godmother by Joyce Pensato. This is the gallery’s second exhibition with the artist.

From her home base in Brooklyn, Joyce Pensato has spent the last four decades crafting an utterly unique approach to painting and drawing. With nods to the vigorous action of abstract expressionist painters, she has systematically attacked a specific set of pop culture icons, including Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Batman, various members of the Simpsons family, Donald Duck, Groucho Marx, and several species of clown. Working on increasingly large scale canvases, she initially worked in black lines on a white background, eventually flipping the scheme and working in white lines on black, and more recently introducing metallic (silver, gold) and spare flashes of color. The paintings are incredibly confident, with many layers accumulated over time, often featuring the drips and splatters of an explosive and joyful practice. Thoroughly uncompromising, the images sometimes carry dark connotations, a banal figure disabused of its superficial lightness, pummeled repeatedly until confessing sinister secrets, passages of red, yellow, and blue poking through the hardscrabble charcoal. Pensato’s drawings are equally brutal, erasure every bit as much an integral part of her technique as actual mark-making. On view at CvsD will be seven brand new drawings, including a large Donald Duck, and eight new canvases, including a series of five eye paintings which feature disembodied eyeballs in a field of paint. Pensato’s work has been shown internationally, including I Killed Kenny , a 2014 exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. In conjunction with The Godmother , Corbett vs. Dempsey has produced a full-color catalog, available at the opening.

Artist Page