JOYCE PENSATO AT PETZEL GALLERY NYC

Homer Simpson by Joyce Pensato

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce castaway, a solo

exhibition by New York based artist Joyce Pensato. This is her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.



For this exhibition, Pensato will present a new series of paintings and drawings, as well as premiere digital c-prints of her studio taken by the artist and predominantly comprised of collages on her studio walls.



The paintings and drawings will reprise her cast of familiar cartoon and comic book characters, including Batman, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Homer Simpson, among others. In the new paintings we see he continued exploration of sporadic leaps into color, especially gold and copper, which represent a departure from what has historically been a strictly black and white painting palette. Whereas colorful pastels have surfaced in Pensato's charcoal drawings over the years, the introduction of color in her paintings is a more recent development and denotes an additional layer within, simultaneously erased and darkened by the profuse and continual saturation of the canvas.

c-prints by Joyce Pensato

The digital c-prints, exhibited for the very first time to the public, are of the artist's Brooklyn studio walls, showing juxtapositions of collages that inform her practice and surround her daily working conditions. Historically, Pensato has imported these various collages and other ephemera-figurines and stuffed animals - into the gallery space to an assemblage effect. However on this occasion these objects will be left behind, allowing the photographs to occupy the same two-dimensional spaces of those of her paintings and drawings. Through these old and new mediums, Pensato continues 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.



Joyce Pensato was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she continues to live and work. Her touring solo show, i Killed Kenny, was first shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (2013) and then traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum of St Louis (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Empire State, curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Sir Norman Rosenthal, at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2013); Interior Visions: Selections from the Collection by Alex Katz at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville (2012); and A Painting Show at The Speed Museum of Art, Louisville (2011). Pensato's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; SFMoMa, San Francisco; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; St Louis Art Museum and the FRAC des Pays de la Loire. She has won numerous awards including the Robert de Niro, Sr Prize (2013), the Award of Merit Medal for Painting, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (1997) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996). 



Petzel Gallery is located at 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM.

JOHN STEZAKER - NEW SILKSCREENS U.S. PREMIERE OF THE FILM "BLIND" AT PETZEL GALLERY NYC.

October 9 - November 8, 2014

456 W 18th Street



Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new silkscreens by the London-based artist John Stezaker and the U.S. premiere of his film "Blind". This is the artist's fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. 



Shadows and silhouettes have been a dominant feature in Stezaker's work since the late 1970s. Some of the earliest of his silhouettes collages called the "Dark Stars,"1979-80, involved the removal of the main figures from cinema publicity portraits of the '40s and '50s and were shown at Petzel Gallery in 2011. In addition to these and other small-scale 'shadow' collages of 1970s and '80s Stezaker also went on to exploit the silhouette device in silkscreen prints on canvas, the first of which was produced in 1989. Now, for the first time in 25 years, he has been able to return to his series of silkscreen prints on black canvas. 



Stezaker's "Shadow" silkscreens respond to the projection and enlargement of the cinematic image. By using redundant lobby film stills as his source material, he inverts their staged, condensed and illustrative scale and returns them to the cinematic experience they once endeavored to represent. Most of the images used in the "Shadow" series come from the 1940s and '50s when the dominant image of cinema seemed to shift from the central spotlight of spectacular vision to the periphery of shadow in what became known as "film noir". Indeed, the shadowy underworlds of B-movies have been a significant source of fascination within Stezaker's relationship to the cinematic image. Whereas his collages establish a distance and remove from the appropriated image, Stezaker's silkscreens generate a palpable bodily through shadowy absences.



Stezaker's return to silkscreen printing reflects a general shift of interest towards the projected image in his recent work. In his latest film "Blind," he also returns the film still to the space of cinematic projection by creating a film of stills - a still film. By projecting a random sequence of his collection of film stills - a still film. By projecting a random sequence of his collection of his collection of film stills, each at 1/24th of a second, a duration at which the eye is said to be physiologically blind to each image, "Blind" creates an intense and dazzling palimpsest of after-images. Initially, "Blind" seems like an overwhelming bombardment of disparate images, like an encounter with the violence of the film image and the incessant difference of image technology. Gradually however, after yielding to the immersive experience, the intensity begins to settle into a dream-like space of estranged after-images.



Both the film and the silkscreens involve a suspension of the image from its original function. Whereas Stezaker's silkscreens and collages generate stilled disconnections through.



John Stezaker was born in England. His work appeared most recently in the 19th Biennale of Sydney in Australia. Institutional solo exhibitions include Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2013) and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, (2011), which traveled to MUDAM Luxembourg and the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. His work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Collection, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Ellipse Foundation, Cacais. He lives and works in London.



Petzel Gallery is located at 456 W 18th Street, New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00am - 6.00pm. For press inquires, please contact Andrew Black at andrew@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.

Wade Guyton At Petzel Gallery NYC