Joyce Pensato

A major museum survey traces five decades of Joyce Pensato’s cartoon-inflected, gestural painting and its relationship to American popular culture.

Joyce Pensato is on view December 2 through March 15 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, bringing together some 65 works from the 1970s through 2019, including rarely seen paintings, drawings and installations from the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Pensato became known for large-scale interpretations of figures such as Batman, Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, rendered with vigorous brushwork and a largely black, white, silver and gold enamel palette that merges abstract gesture with pop imagery.

The exhibition follows recurring characters and motifs across her career, from early Batman drawings and vividly colored oil abstractions to the enamel works that defined her mature style. Groupings devoted to Mickey Mouse, a wall of cropped “eyes” sourced from characters like Barney and South Park’s Stan, and a series of Batman paintings underscore how Pensato reworked familiar figures into psychologically charged, sometimes unsettling icons that reflect shifts in American media and technology.

Organized by ICA Miami in collaboration with the Joyce Pensato Foundation, the survey is accompanied by a major catalogue with new scholarship that situates her practice within postwar abstraction, pop and the generations of painters she influenced.