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Cartoon Studio: Q+A With Joyce Pensato
Joyce Pensato's current show at Friedrich Petzel is titled "Batman Returns," but it might have been called "The Return of the Repressed." Along with a generous sampling of recent paintings and drawings of Batman and other cartoon character heads and masks in her signature style of aggressive strokes and drips, Pensato includes detritus from the Brooklyn studio she was forced to vacate last spring after 32 years of occupancy, allowing visitors to see the traces of her private creative process.
Whole walls were removed and sections put on display, along with stapled and paint-covered photographs, piles of broken furniture, soiled stuffed animals and oddball knick-knacks that have been her inspiration over the years. All of these items are covered, more or less, in splattered paint, so that the entire exhibition resembles a giant Joyce Pensato tableau.
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Matthew Marks on His New West Hollywood Outpost
Matthew Marks opened the fifth location of his gallery (he has 4 in New York) last week on the east side of West Hollywood. Located just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, the building features a permanent architectural intervention by Ellsworth Kelly, who is also featured in the new space's inaugural show,. The 40-feet long rectangular black form, inspired by the artist's Study for Black on White Panels (1954) and Black Over White (1966), hovers in relief along the top of the facade's length, a minimal gesture that is both monumental and understated.
The building, both inside and out, is as much the product of its architect, Peter Zellner, as it is of Kelly. The interior, a sizable 3,000 square feet, features six square glass skylights recessed into the ceiling. These provide shadowless daylighting to the space, in accord with the artist's specifications. In the main space, Kelly shows six new relief paintings [through April 7]—mostly rectilinear canvases superimposed by equally colorful oblong monochromes, each parabolic form appearing to defer to an uneven gravitational pull to the left or right.
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MFA Houston's Online Latin Art Archive Launches
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a longtime proponent of Latin American Art, recently made a new 10-year commitment to champion the cause. The museum, in collaboration with its research institute, the International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA), has earmarked $50 million for the endeavor, which includes a massive online archive assembled by hundreds of researchers in 16 cities in the U.S. and throughout Latin America. The debut installment, which launched last week, features more than 10,000 primary source materials gathered by hundreds of researchers in 16 cities throughout the Western Hemisphere. It is available worldwide and free of charge.
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Docu-Matters: Q+A With Iconoclast Peter Fend
Peter Fend is a hard-driving, opinionated environmental missionary who for several decades has challenged perceptions of what art can do. During the late '70s and early '80s in New York's East Village, Peter Fend collaborated with various artists (Paul Sharits, Wolfgang Staehle and Joan Waltemath, among others), buying satellite data for environmental and political hotspots, adding analysis and selling it to TV networks. His ecologically minded schemes involve collecting plants in still waters for biogas and building channels in desert areas to restore plant and animal habitats. Fend showed regularly with Colin de Land at American Fine Arts through the '90s. In the early 2000s, he left New York for Germany and ultimately began traveling to various locations where he could work on specific projects, most recently spending time in New Zealand.
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Keeping His Marbles: Q+A With Gian Enzo Sperone
"Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week" and "Portraits/Self-Portraits from the 16th Century to the 21st Century," currently on view at Sperone Westwater, Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery with Angela Westwater on the Bowery, combine two of the 71-year-old dealer's passions: collecting and history. With 90% of the works coming from Sperone's private collection, the shows spread over four floors-the marble exhibition is on the ground floor and balcony; and the portraits are on the two floors above.
"I do exhibitions like these to explore how good our great artists are in comparison to the Old World Masters," Sperone told A.i.A. "I have expectations for how I think the language of the art world should develop."
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Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, a city with one museum and one major gallery, Nick Van Woert's mixed-media practice evolved from doodles, dra
