Rob Pruitt  who last week opened a gargantuan solo exhibition inspired by the Amish tradition of Rumspringa, the period during which some teenagers sow wild oats before they reach the age to join the church  is not the first artist you might think of when you think Anabaptist. You might go way down the list before getting to Mr. Pruitt, 46, a gleefully tricky purveyor of trash culture who is known for making paintings of pandas and of Paris Hilton, who has fashioned an eternal-flame monument from a bar table and a Bic lighter, and who once held an extremely brief gallery show composed solely of a long floor mirror bisected by a line of real cocaine, which was ingested by visitors.

But Mr. Pruitt has been through his own personal version of a wandering-homecoming experience, a kind of reverse Rumspringa that became so well known it has shaped his career and reputation almost as much as his work itself. In 1992 Mr. Pruitt and a collaborator, Jack Early, put together a splashy, irreverent exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery exploring the marketing of African-American culture. A decade later it might have been the subject of battling reviews, but at the time the winds of political correctness quickly turned the show, by two Southern white men, into an incendiary event. They were called cynical, even racist, and were essentially drummed out of the art world for years; Mr. Pruitt ended up selling couture dresses for a while and coming up with craft ideas for Martha Stewart Living.

As a man who earnestly, and convincingly, describes the gallery world as his church, Mr. Pruitt was devastated by his expulsion from it. In a sense he has worked for almost 20 years to earn a place back among the faithful. And with his new show, “Pattern and Degradation”  whose pieces fill more than 13,000 square feet of space at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the West Village gallery that represents him, and at a nearby gallery, Maccarone  Mr. Pruitt is making his most ambitious bid yet. He seems to be trying to make a case for himself not just as a congregant but also as a deacon, a major artist.

The show, which runs through Oct. 23, was two years in the planning. In addition to a room filled with bright, eye-popping paintings inspired by Amish quilts, whose patterns he researched on numerous trips to Amish country and quilt museums in Pennsylvania, there are monumental self-portraits; a wall of photo-based paintings of Cinnabon cinnamon buns topped with fake icing; paintings of T-shirts; oil paintings made from Ikea wall-art pieces; a room of cast-off tire sculptures; and wallpaper made from pictures of all of Mr. Pruitt’s Facebook friends (more than 1,300 at the time the wallpaper was printed) and from viral shots on the Web of “kitlers”  kittens that resemble Hitler. With a sly grin Mr. Pruitt describes the show as an attempt to “stretch myself a little bit.”