Joyce Pensato’s second exhibition with Lisson Gallery, features an entirely new body of work, encompassing large-scale paintings, drawings and a site-specific wallpaper installation.

An alumna of the New York Studio School in the 1970s, Pensato challenged the school’s strict figurative life drawing practice and painted directly from cardboard cut-outs, dolls and photographs as a replacement for the traditional fruit of still lifes.

While cartoons and cultural ephemera still provide her with subject matter, the works on display at Lisson Gallery speak more of Pensato’s ongoing experimentation with technique, as well as the positioning and fragmentation of figures.

The exhibition features a series of four golden Donald Ducks, which will be installed next to an over-three-metre-wide painting of Batman’s eyeless cowl, which stares out through the dripped, splashed surface of Pensato’s frenzied and sustained assault on the canvas. Further damage is done to another mask. This act, which she says represents “an itch you cannot scratch”, mirrors the self-destructive nature of her drawings and suggests the origin of one of Pensato’s own alter-egos, ‘The Eraser’ (she also goes by ‘The Fizz’ and ‘The Godmother’, all the while channelling the spirit and energy of Gena Rowlands).

Three large-scale drawings in the front space of the gallery continue Pensato’s experimentation with rupture and repair. Drawings are further explored as part of her wallpaper installation, beginning at the bottom of the staircase and exploding across the entire first-floor exhibition space

Before painting, Pensato often pins up photographs that she amasses, (often featuring the likes of Robert De Niro, to whom the exhibition title nods). These collages are then photographed again, or, as in this case, transformed into wallpaper.