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One Fine Show: “Joyce Pensato” at ICA Miami

Her works push familiar cartoon icons toward abstraction, testing how much visual information can disappear before meaning collapses.

Recently, an art critic friend and I were discussing how much we’re dreading Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey, and somewhere in the thread we started exploring the extent to which we liked the director at all. The critic said he will always have a soft spot for Inception, and I offered that I had to admire what he’d done with Batman. For a character with a relatively simple premise, people have been lining up over the decades to take a crack at him like he’s Hamlet. Adam West’s version has nothing to do with Ben Affleck’s, just as Frank Miller’s has little in common with Grant Morrison’s. And let’s not forget that he actually is Hamlet. Nolan went for Patrick Bateman mixed with George W. Bush, a perfect avatar for America at the turn of the millennium.

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Batman was also a key figure in the career of Joyce Pensato (1941-2019), the painter whose recently opened survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami constitutes her largest ever museum exhibition, bringing together some 65 works from across five decades. In the 1980s, Pensato developed a gestural style of painting that carved out a unique post-Pop aesthetic. It affects an ironic and insane obsession with inescapable characters like Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, the Simpsons family and Cartman from South Park.

Batman seems to have been the big one, though. In this exhibition, he appears in drawings that date as early as 1976. It might just be that he has the best graphic design. He’s captured in these early drawings with the irregular limb angles of an action figure and seemingly alongside other, less distinct toys. Batman will always have a reliable pointiness to his head and his chest. All of us can draw his symbol from memory. There’s no mistaking him.

This concept having been established, Joyce Pensato sought to break it. She began to ask how little Batman she could have in a piece while still having you recognize it as Batman. Batman (1994) first conjures the feeling of pitch because it is enamel on Strathmore paper, a profound black. The second conjuration arrives pretty quickly, however, thanks to those two points at the head and three dark spots connoting the mask’s eyes and mouth. This would have been not long after Tim Burton’s movies conquered theaters and then everywhere else through their relentless merchandising.

She did this with her other characters, too, but Batman is the most fun to track throughout her career because of that durability. She can do the most with him. The 2010s yield Golden Batman (2014), Battitude (2015), Bobo Batman (2016) and Majestic Batman (2017), among others. These are all more similar than they aren’t, all enamel on canvas with some baroque version of the character’s mask. But diverse characterizations emerge from the angles of the eyes and the variations of color. They never seem to drip in exactly the same way. Our most emo superhero has never had more personality.

“Joyce Pensato” is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami through March 15, 2026.

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