lisa yuskavage biography

Lisa Yuskavage

American Painter

Summary of Lisa Yuskavage

New York City painter Lisa Yuskavage's women arrive to her canvas in pearlescent swaths of otherworldly color straight from the annals of candy-hued fantasies. Throbbing with a sexual tension that teeters between liberation and objectification, her women take center stage, their highly exaggerated bulbous genitalia and voluptuous nudity meticulously inspired by classical High Renaissance techniques yet wrapped in the provocative questions of contemporary society. Are her women enjoying their own private moments of unabashed sensual bloom under the complicated gaze of society's sexual mores? Or are they expressing their personally complex relationship with their own bodies that women universally lament as they navigate an environment where body parts are elevated to iconic status as in the traditional, historical nude? Yuskavage's semi-uncomfortable foray into this centuries' old exploration of the female body has catapulted her into her current role as a leading figurative painter of our time.

Accomplishments

• An innocent early fascination with the female body and the various ways it could be presented was the original impetus for Yuskavage's painting. Over time, this fascination evolved when Yuskavage realized she was bored with merely painting women, and began to materialize an unmistakable signature style based in overly sexualized figures lingering in a visceral ambiance between passivity and control.
• In true Postmodern fashion, Yuskavage's paintings build up imagery from multiple art historical sources, often containing references to artists who have influenced her. In doing this, she treats art history as a fertile soil from where multiple new ideas can be grown. A prime example of this is her often use of sfumato.
• Yuskavage has stated that her favorite thing about viewing Renaissance paintings, was that she could see in them that, "the supernatural has arrived." She accomplishes her own sort of supernatural feel by presenting color palettes that seem highly unnatural and built upon the frothy tones of dream worlds preferred by young girls.
• Yuskavage has suffered much criticism from feminists and other groups concerned with the treatment of women in popular culture. Yet, instead of eschewing blame for her own presumed collusion, she honestly states, "Misogyny is so rampant, extreme and insidious that it doesn't get called out nearly enough. A lot of men, including gay men, are misogynists, and a lot of women are too. I've experienced it personally from so many, and I can therefore assume that because I live in this society I must have absorbed it too, so if I want to talk about misogyny I have to first acknowledge the aspects of it I've absorbed."

The Life of Lisa Yuskavage

When Lisa Yuskavage was scanning a Penthouse magazine for inspiration for her "soft porn" paintings in a shop one day, a man approached and asked if she was doing research. She told him she was doing whatever he was doing, adding: "I didn’t want to lose the right to be a creep. I want the range. I don’t just want to be a good feminist doing research."

Important Art by Lisa Yuskavage

A rich, golden glow permeates this painting as if lit by the warm, flickering embers of a fire. The sculptural form hinting at a female figure slowly emerges from within the frame; seen from behind, her head is tilted coyly to the side allowing her long hair to fall over one shoulder. We cannot see her face, giving her a certain mystique, but drooping shoulders suggest sadness or resignation. Her back forms an exaggerated, bulbous curve, whose hard surface catches the light. Onto the wall behind her a series of intricate patterns dissolve like faded wallpaper. Yuskavage made this haunting painting early in her career, before she began to work on her signature, hypersexualized figures. The work was in part influenced by the monochrome abstraction of Color Field Painting, which was a popular trend when she was a student at Yale in the 1980s. Into the warm, orange hues her addition of a sculptural figure and the suggestion of wallpaper creates illusionistic depth, revealing her innate interest in painterly narrative, alongside contemporary abstraction. Referring to the work as timid and reserved, over the next few years Yuskavage set out to explore the sculptural, figurative language seen here with more direct, confrontational imagery, turning her female characters outwards to face the viewer in all their glory.

Oil and wax on linen over panel

The Ones That Don't Want To: Kelly Marie

This painting is infused with an intense, artificial green light, from which a curious female figure reluctantly emerges. There is an eerie duality between restraint and availability in her clothing; her upper body is covered all the way up to her neck, yet she is naked from the waist down. Her pale face and auburn hair is lit from above with a ghostly white light, making it the main focus of the painting, and we are drawn in by her sour expression and the permeating fear in her eyes. In her hands she carefully balances a delicate cup and saucer, as if serving an imaginary client. This painting is one of a series Yuskavage made as she was beginning to find her true artistic voice, exploring a dichotomy between voyeurism and fear. In some of her paintings the women she portrays are sexually liberated, while others, like this one, seem repressed and controlled, as suggested by the work's title. The women she painted at this time were set against monochrome backdrops, again showing her interest in the abstract Color Field precedents. Yuskavage worked from her imagination to produce this painting, which was one of a series titled The Ones That Don't Want To , a series she also refers to as the Bad Babies . Her intention was to create discomfort for viewers, portraying pert young women who are being ogled, but do not want to be, saying, "They did not enjoy being impotent spectacles - they couldn't walk away or defend themselves from the glare ... of the viewer." Yuskavage had mixed responses when showing this series to her friends for the first time, but she knew she was in the right place, saying, "I was making for the first time in my life what I intuited was great art and felt what artists when they make great art feel. Alive in every way." Her friend, the artist Jesse Murry quoted Bette Davis when he saw her work, saying, "... you are going to have to fasten your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy ride." Murry rightly predicted the storm of trouble and criticism coming her way, gaining her a career-defining notoriety.

Oil on linen

Big Blonde with Hairdo

In this apple green, monochrome painting a naked woman is perched precariously on one foot. Yuskavage creates tension here by combining sexually provocative material with a doe-eyed innocence. Through Shirley Temple curls a large, Bambi eye peeks out with a mix of curiosity and trepidation; she is on one hand a seductive temptress, but her coy, partially hidden face and fearful expression expose the model's reluctance to take on this role, suggesting danger lurking beneath the surface. This work was produced as one of the series Big Blondes , featuring naked, archetypal blondes in provocative poses seen squatting or smoking. Such material had never been placed into works of art in this way and Yuskavage knew she was taking a risk, saying, "It was considered pretty incorrect for me to be using these images, but I was intrigued." Much like her Bad Babies series, in her Big Blondes paintings innocent young women are seen on the brink of adulthood, hesitantly allowing themselves to be ogled, making the viewer deliberately uncomfortable. She said of these paintings, "The figure was in a sfumato field, and though its edges were dematerializing, the eyeballs were always hard and fixed on the viewer." The pose of the model here was influenced by those seen in Penthouse magazine, where women are posed in such a way to seem as sexually attractive and alluring as possible. In a bid to make her paintings more controversial, Yuskavage imagined looking at women in her paintings through the "male gaze." She also sought ways to integrate single figures into monochrome fields of color during this stage of her career, saying, "The mono-figure and the monochrome were very connected in terms of their psychological impact, their full on intensity." Yuskavage was also greatly influenced by Neo Pop artists Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, drawing on kitsch subjects, which traditionally would be considered "tasteless," elevating them to the status of fine art. She raised the status of her Penthouse women by combining them with various art historical references, from the sfumato light and form of the Renaissance to the broad, the monochromes of Color Field Painters. The large, expressive eyes seen here can also be compared with Margaret Keane's figures.

KK in Red Room

A scantily clad woman reclines in a grand, warm-colored room, surrounded by a band of lush, blooming flowers. Dressed in provocative clothing, she disappears into her own realm of sexual pleasure. Daylight seeps in from a window behind her, falling across the soft velvet chair and her exposed skin. The woman in this painting, referred to as KK, was Yuskavage's close friend from school, who she hired as a model. Painting from life marked a departure from Yuskavage's fantasy Penthouse inspired women, allowing her to explore a new level of realism. KK appeared in a number of paintings, taking up the role of the archetypal blonde bombshell, epitomizing the stereotypical American male fantasy figure. As with many of her previous paintings, the work has an overall monochrome palette, but the flat backgrounds of her previous paintings have opened up here to include greater detail, allowing it to take on narrative or symbolic significance. There is also an unsettling, voyeuristic quality to the painting, emphasized by the flowers in the foreground, which an unseen peeping tom, or even a hidden camera, could be hiding behind while spying on KK. Yuskavage puts viewers into this position, creating the uncomfortable sensation of intrusion. This frank exploration of the female body and its potent sexuality has influenced numerous artists since, particularly the fleshy, womanly bodies in British artist Jenny Saville's work.

Half Family

A young, blonde woman kneels on a grassy outcrop with her body tilted back, her loose tendrils of hair blowing in the wind with a carefree abandon. She is wearing a tight-fitting pair of beaded knickers that could be made from sweets or pieces of fruit, some of which are dropping off, emphasizing her ripe sexuality. She seems narcissistically self-absorbed, seemingly fascinated by her own sexual possibilities, while behind her a storm is brewing. There is a suggestion here of a young women coming of age, just beginning to discover her own sexual freedom, while still unaware of its potential dangers. This painting, like Yuskavage's others from the decade, marked a departure away from interior spaces with a move into the landscape, where she could give her characters greater freedom, while adding drama to the work. The David Zwirner gallery, that represents Yuskavage today, said, "Rich, atmospheric skies frequently augment the psychologically charged mood, further adding to the impression of theatricality and creative possibility." Public admiration for this painting has given it an iconic status, with several subsequent appearances in popular culture; Kate Moss posed for a photo shoot with W Magazine in an identical manner as the character seen here, and it appeared in episode four of Emmy nominated drama The L Word .

An expansive, barren landscape with rolling green hills that disappear into the distance sprawls beneath a pink tinged sky that is cut into with jagged branches, creating a sense of unease. In the center, two busty young women are nestled among a pile of rocks while a ghostly pair of legs emerges on the right suggesting a third, unseen character. Yuskavage's mysterious women seem to be emerging dazed and confused from a post-apocalyptic disaster amidst a broken heap of rubble. That the women are in a state of partial undress suggests this is the morning after some sexual encounter. Their striped stockings, a recurring motif in Yuskavage's paintings, add a flare of intense color into an otherwise muted scheme. This painting represents Yuskavage's mature painting style, which incorporates voluptuous female protagonists amidst a broad, open landscape. These paintings delve further into the realms of the fantastical and surreal, opening the work up to multiple interpretations. Yuskavage has often discussed her admiration for the work of the Surrealist sculptor Hans Bellmer, and the influence of his rounded female forms can clearly be seen here. Influences from Renaissance painters such as Bellini and Carravaggio can also be seen, particularly in the foreshortened plate of fruit and the women's sculptural bodies. Yuskavage moved away from painting real models or Playboy style, fantasy women here, working instead from a series of her own plaster sculptures.

Oil on linen - Private Collection

An acid bright yellow floods the surface of this painting, capturing the vibrancy of the setting sun. Several characters can be seen, including a pair of young children sitting back to back and a young man on the right, who leans casually on a walking stick. But dominating the canvas are two women, one a powerful femme fatale with pendulous breasts splaying outward and flowing long hair blowing in the wind; the other only seen bent over from behind. Around them ripe fruits are piled up and spill over one another suggesting free-flowing sexual energy. Much like her painting Wilderness , made two years earlier, there is an ambiguous story unfolding here which we can only guess at, with a private symbolism suggesting multiple interpretations. By this stage in her career Yuskavage had begun to fill her paintings with numerous art historical references. Her sprawling landscapes reference the Hudson River School, the Northern Renaissance and the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, while the curvaceous figures with fleshy bodies and the rolling fruit resembling Gustave Courbet's paintings. This layered approach, building an image up from multiple art historical sources, epitomises the Postmodern mind set, treating art history as a fertile soil from where multiple new ideas can be grown. Yuskavage has often spoken about her deep connection with other artists, saying, "I've come to experience art like a séance. Over time you can meld minds with artists: you laugh and feel their humor, or you are shocked by their sadness and grief."

The Art Students

A sense of discovery and wonder permeates this painting. Two art students paint the body of a third female figure, bringing her to life. Yuskavage described this grouping as a "triad," making reference to the holy trinity. While two are fully formed, the third, reclining female is only half painted, as if still developing into adulthood. Set in a suburban back garden, this story seems to unfold in the grey, half light of the early morning. Behind them the sky glows with supernatural light, bleeding through the fence in thin slivers. The title of the work, The Art Students , seems to reference the playful discovery in art school, which Yuskavage likens here to a sexual awakening, portraying naked young bodies engaging with each other. The confident, pleased expression on the face of the female figure in the center reinforces this coming of age symbolism; she is powerful and self-assured, finding herself through burgeoning intimate interactions. Yuskavage has often talked about her fascination with Renaissance painting, particularly those portraying the moment "the supernatural has arrived." Here the unnatural, glowing sky suggests an otherworldly event is taking place. Such powerful portrayals of young people on the brink of adulthood can be compared with many contemporary artists, including the angst-ridden teenagers in Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum's paintings, or the sexually-inquisitive characters in Eric Fischl's suburban portraits.

A deep, golden light beams out from this painting, featuring two embracing figures. From the back of the painting a young, blonde woman emerges, her white, slender arms reaching out over the older man in front. The pair's hands are interlocked in the foreground, where the woman's long white fingers resemble spider legs. There is a stark contrast between the coloring of the two characters; she is young, pale and blonde, he is older, tanned and "golden." He is decorated in ornate golden jewelry including an orb suspended around his neck, giving him a God-like quality. Yuskavage sets up a complicated power play between the two figures here. On the one hand the man seems to be in control, infused with the heady, golden glow of money. He takes center stage and we can't be sure if he is forcibly pulling the woman's arms over his shoulders like a worshiping neophyte or if she is willingly embracing him with such subservience. His expression could be a smile but his eyes are tinged with pain and sadness. The female figure could be a rich man's accessory, held captive and out of control. Yuskavage often paints her female figures with this mix of passivity and control. She has often spoken of her fascination with Hans Baldung's Death and the Maiden paintings, where skeletal figures prey upon young women. But here it is the young woman who resembles the skeletal predator here, and there is a suggestion that the woman could be the specter of death visiting the man's door. This potent symbolism between sex and death is a recurring theme throughout the history of art and one which Yuskavage updates for the 21st century with a series of contemporary cultural references.

Biography of Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage was born in 1962 and grew up in the working class neighbourhood of Juniata Park, Philadelphia with one older sister. Her father was a pie truck driver, while her mother was a homemaker with inventive sewing skills. The artist remembers "finding" art at around age 12, a skill which set her apart from her academic sister who would go on to become a doctor. She recalls, "I remember sitting at my grandmother's table with a tablet - that's what we always called a pad of paper - and drawing. I always drew naked people, and then I tore them up. I was always only ever interested in people."

As a teenager Yuskavage attended the Philadelphia High School for Girls. She remembers, "I wasn't one of the top students. I was kind of muddling through for a long time." A high spirited and sociable young student, one teacher wrote in a report, "Lisa needs to talk less in class." Academic life failed to sustain her interest, but the diverse girls she encountered in her high school were a source of great fascination. She remembers vividly, "(The girls in my) high school were from all over Philadelphia; everybody was slightly nerdy because you had to be smart to get in. (We had) Ukrainian girls that would come to school dressed in their Ukrainian national garb a couple of times a month, white girls from South Philadelphia that were Italian. It was very multicultural."

At school she was taught by nuns and she initially toyed with the idea of becoming a nun herself, describing them as "the first feminists I met." But after experiencing a sexual awakening she found solidarity instead with the girls around her, who were all experiencing the brink of adulthood together with trepidation and fascination. She remembers, "We were obsessed with Playgirl , and everybody thought we were crazy because we were reading the sexual fantasies in the magazine. We were so anxious to grow up and to become sexual creatures, trying really hard ... to understand what was going on."

As a young adult Yuskavage was mesmerized by the female body, unafraid of examining and playfully exploring the various ways it could be represented without shame or embarrassment. She remembers organizing an alternative art project with her friends which she jokingly titled, The Tit Papers , where everyone would draw their breasts from various different angles; the project later came to influence her paintings Tit Heaven , which she described as "disembodied breasts having adventures."

Early Training and Work

Yuskavage received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1984. During that time, she spent one year studying in Rome, where she was overwhelmed by the high drama and perfection of Renaissance masterpieces. She said, "In Rome, I got even more distracted and ... even more lost, because then I was wandering around looking at masterpieces like, 'I'm never going to be an artist if this is what art looks like, because I'm so bad.' I felt much more diminished." In spite of this, the chiaroscuro and sfumato effects from the great Italian masters including Tintoretto, Giovanni Bellini , and Caravaggio infiltrated her subconscious, ready to be released in the years to follow.

After art school, Yuskavage finished her graduate work at Yale, where she met the painters John Currin and Jesse Murry, and her future husband Matvey Levestein. She was taught by Mel Bochner and William Bailey, but they shared differing viewpoints, as she recalls, "I remember once in a critique of my work, my teacher William Bailey was furious that it didn't have enough 'fiction building.' He quoted Magritte : ' Ceci n'est pas une pipe , Lisa!' I said, 'But I want the paintings to be real!' To which he snapped, 'Well, that's not a good goal.'" Yuskavage continued to pursue the "real" throughout her degree, graduating with an MFA in 1986.

In the years following graduation Yuskavage hoped to gain a teaching position in a university, but it proved more challenging than expected. After receiving countless rejections she eventually secured a job teaching adult evening classes in the school of continuing education at Cooper Union, all the while looking for a more full-time position. But as her artistic career developed, the world of teaching became increasingly distant, not least due to the explicit nature of her work, as she explained, "The end result was that the art world was open but the world of academia was shut to my kind."

Yuskavage held her first solo exhibition in 1990, four years after graduating, but it was not the pinnacle of success she had hoped for. She says of her paintings portraying demure women seen from behind, "I did not connect to the paintings once I saw them on the gallery's walls." The work was too reserved and timid for her taste, and she yearned to produce something with more bite. During this time she encountered an exhibition by the artist Jeff Koons which she described as "like getting smacked in the face. It was nasty work, but it was better than what I did because it was affecting me."

She considered quitting painting, taking up film, writing fiction, or taking a year off to think, read, watch movies, and look at art. Around that time, Yuskavage remembered being invited, but then later uninvited to a friend's dinner party, because she was "too much." She decided her art should take on this direct, sparky quality to reflect her true persona. Dennis Hopper's psychotic criminal character Frank Booth from the film Blue Velvet was also influential, and she imagined making paintings seen through his creepy, voyeuristic eyes.

Mature Period

After experiencing a crisis in 1990, Yuskavage returned to painting in 1991 with the drive to produce a more outlandish and confrontational form of art. Before embarking on new work she had a vivid dream which took on great significance, in which she remembers encountering her old high school motto, Vincit qui se vincit , (Latin for "she conquers who conquers herself"). With great bravado, she subsequently launched into a new series of work.

Throughout the 1990s Yuskavage painted pert, busty, and naked young women in idealized or exaggerated forms, seen against monochrome backdrops through the hazy lens of soft porn. This included the series Bad Baby and Big Blondes . Her intense, single color backdrops played on the language of Color Field painters that were so popular with many of her contemporaries. Although she was greatly inspired by the Renaissance masters including Caravaggio and Tintoretto, she searched vintage issues of Penthouse magazine for modern day muses, in a Koons-like move to elevate "tasteless" imagery into high art. She remembers, "It was considered pretty incorrect for me to be using these images, but I was intrigued." Such work secured her place as a major force in figurative painting alongside others including Neo Rauch , Chris Ofili , Marlene Dumas , and John Currin , making her one of a generation engaged in reinventing the modern figure for contemporary art.

Along with great success came an onslaught of criticism, particularly from Feminists, who saw Yuskavage's sexualized female figures as derogatory and objectifying. Critics were divided; some saw her work as deeply misogynistic, but for others her hypersexual, overblown sex objects were seen as a cynical reflection of the misogyny latent in contemporary culture. For Yuskavage, her paintings had simpler roots, as she explained in an interview, "Paintings of nudes have been done, so I asked, 'how can it be done differently?'"

In 2007 The Washington Post published a special report titled Lisa Yuskavage: Critiquing Prurient Sexuality, or Disingenuously Peddling a Soft-Porn Aesthetic? , where scholar Amelia Jones discussed the complex arguments Yuskavage's paintings raise about the representation of women today.

Recently Yuskavage has been more outspoken on the issues her paintings have raised, saying, "Misogyny is so rampant, extreme and insidious... I've experienced it personally from so many, and I can therefore assume that because I live in this society I must have absorbed it too.... I admire (Philip) Guston and Diane Arbus and (Rainer Werner) Fassbinder because they show a myriad of internal conflicts. That's what art is - a struggle filtered through the self. That is how it becomes generous."

Late Period

Today Yuskavage continues to live with her husband Levestein in New York, where she has a large studio and is represented by David Zwirner Gallery. The notoriety surrounding her work in the 1990s has been the key to her success, with her paintings now in worldwide collections. In the past few decades she has also held a number of major international solo exhibitions, with another scheduled for 2020, co-organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum. Today, her paintings enjoy celebrity-like status, with one recently selling at auction for more than $1 million dollars and another, the painting Half Family , featured in the Emmy nominated television drama The L Word .

In the last few decades Yuskavage's paintings have become increasingly complex; isolated girls and women have expanded into group arrangements, set in back gardens, hotel rooms, and vast, barren landscapes, or nestled amongst over-ripe fruits that are ready to burst. She has become a rich storyteller, weaving together mysterious, sexually charged narratives featuring wanton young women as playmates for each other and their male lovers. More recently she has also painted Jesus-like men as free-loving hippies.

Critics have highlighted the duality of her work, which weaves the seductive and the unsettling together, entangling sexual desirability with body dysmorphia, a conflict familiar to many women. Danger lurks in the artificial lighting, post-apocalyptic settings, and ambiguous faces that could suggest ecstasy or fear. Gary Garrels, chief curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has said, "The images are extremely seductive in terms of color and ... light. They are very haunting ...poignant ... brave paintings."

The Legacy of Lisa Yuskavage

Yuskavage is part of a generation of conceptual, figurative painters that emerged in the 1990s. She is often compared with other so called "bad girl" painters who explore transgressive territory related to the human body including Jenny Saville , Cecily Brown , and Marlene Dumas . Infused into Yuskavage's paintings is a clash of high and low cultural references that sets her apart from her peers; the technical mastery and glowing light of Renaissance painting is populated with references to lads' magazines and soft porn. Writer Jane Harris has said, "...bawdy girl meets society's uncompromising mirror ... (which) seems closer in spirit to the films of Russ Meyer and John Waters." This postmodern fusion of references is akin to the Neo Pop art of Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley , while both she and her friend John Currin occupy similar territory, distorting and exaggerating the idealized female form.

As a Conceptual painter, Yuskavage's transgressive subjects have become part of a Post-Feminist debate, particularly potent with the rise of the #MeToo campaign, and they continue to raise contentious issues relating to the portrayal of women, ideas which have influenced subsequent generations of artists. British artist Tracey Emin has explored her own body as a complex site of desire, vulnerability, and strength with an unflinching eye, while sculptor Rebecca Warren's strident, bulbous forms exaggerate and caricature the female form.

Interactions between characters in Yuskavage's paintings have also proved influential for many; Iranian artist Sanam Khatibi echoes this witty interplay in her highly detailed depictions of women as both vulnerable and predatory. Much like Yuskavage, her paintings occupy what she calls, "the thin line that exists between our fears and desires." Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum paint teens in bleak settings together, drawing attention to the angst and longing that permeates so many of Yuskavage's paintings.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Lisa Yuskavage

• Lisa Yuskavage: Essays Our Pick By Christopher Bedford, Suzanne Hudson, Catherine Lord, and Siddhartha Mukherjee; in Conversation with Katy Siegel
• Lisa Yuskavage: Small Paintings by Tamara Jenkins By Tamara Jenkin
• Lisa Yuskavage Our Pick By Faye Hirsh and Chuck Close
• Lisa Yuskavage Our Pick By David Zwirner
• Lateral Thinking By Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, John Currin, Gary Hill, Damien Hirst, William Kentridge, Gabriel Orozco, Ed Ruscha, Lisa Yuskavage and David Hammons
• The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making their World By Robert Cozzolino, Glenn Adamson, Anna C. Chave
• Lisa Yuskavage official website Our Pick
• In the Studio: Lisa Yuskavage Our Pick By Jarrett Earnest / Art in America / September 30 2015
• Lisa Yuskavage: Musings of an Edge-of-Towner By Meeka Walsh and Robert Enright / Border Crossings Magazine / September 2017
• Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner, New York By Barry Schwabsky / Map Magazine / March 2007
• Review: Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner By Roberta Smith / The New York Times / April 30, 2015
• Looking Beyond the Obvious in Lisa Yuskavage's Mighty Paintings By Robert Moeller / Hyperallergic Magazine / October 30, 2015
• Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner By Nancy Princenthal / Art in America / Jan 6, 2012
• Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood By Jeff Fraiman / Brooklyn Rail Magazine / February 3rd, 2016
• Lisa Yuskavage By Ken Johnson / New York Times / June 20, 2003
• This Is How Lisa Yuskavage Makes a Painting artnet News / May 4, 2016
• With an Expansive David Zwirner Show and a Traveling Survey Show, Lisa Yuskavage Is About to Be Everywhere By Sarah Cascone / artnet News / November 5, 2018
• Lisa Yuskavage in Conversation By Laura Allsop / Ocula Magazine / July 7 2017
• Good World to Be In: An Interview with Lisa Yuskavage By Thomas Gebremedhin / The Paris Review / April 29, 2015
• Housewarming Devices: Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner By Erin Hinz / Art Critical Magazine / June 11th 2015
• Lisa Yuskavage Doesn't Want to Be a "Good Feminist." Her Paintings Are Better for It By Alina Cohen / Artsy / Nov 14, 2018
• Dangerous Beauty By Andrea K. Scott / The New Yorker / October 24 2011
• Lisa Yuskavage: Critiquing Prurient Sexuality...or Disingenuously Peddling a Soft-Porn Aesthetic? Our Pick By Cathryn Keller / April 22 2007 / The Washington Post
• Lisa Yuskavage artist talk to accompany the exhibition The Brood at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) in February 2016 Our Pick
• Lisa Yuskavage: artist talk at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Glassell School of Art, Houston, TX, April 5, 2014 Our Pick
• 5 Questions: Lisa Yuskavage, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
• The Artist Project: Lisa Yuskavage on Édouard Vuillard, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 26, 2015
• 13 Artists in the Studio: Lisa Yuskavage discusses her work in interview, Morgan Snyder St John, 19 Aug 2013
• Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast Podcast of a discussion between Lisa Yuskavage and Tamara Jenkins for David Zwirner gallery as part of the series
• Featured on episode 4 of The L Word
• Reference in the novel trilogy China Rich Girlfriend of the Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

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Content compiled and written by Rosie Lesso

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols

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A Painter Who Wants Art to Shock

With a new exhibition, Lisa Yuskavage demonstrates her mastery of her medium and her unique talent for upending its conventions.

By Julia Felsenthal

The painter Lisa Yuskavage , who grew up a truck driver’s daughter in what she describes as the “hardscrabble” Juniata Park neighborhood of Philadelphia, now lives in Midtown Manhattan with her husband, the artist Matvey Levenstein , and their cockapoo, Phillip. But for the past 10 years, Yuskavage, 57, has made the daily journey to a quiet corner of Gowanus, Brooklyn, where she keeps her studio, a cavernous 4,000-square-foot space in a low-rise brick building that she has cleaved down the middle with a 40-foot-long wall. She compares the two sides to the two halves of her brain. In the back room, spare and suffused with northern light, Dionysian Lisa lets her “id run amok” on the canvas; in the bookshelf-lined front room, Apollonian Lisa — “rational, logical, organized” — tends to the big business of being a successful contemporary artist. “I have to be pretty un-self-conscious when I’m working,” Yuskavage says one January afternoon. “And then later I become extremely conscious.”

If you’ve seen her outré canvases, you understand why she has to shed her inhibitions. Yuskavage, a masterful colorist, makes lush, luminous, intentionally — and delightfully — gauche paintings that unsettle facile notions of misogyny, femininity and the female gaze. Her “ Bad Babies ” series, Technicolor studies created in the early ’90s of plaintive Manga-like pubescent girls depicted naked from the waist down, earned her a reputation as a provocateur when she was just a few years out of Yale’s MFA painting program. Another early work, “ Rorschach Blot ” (1995), encapsulated Yuskavage’s psychosexual shtick in a single image: a cartoonish blonde, knees splayed, reveals the entirety of her nether regions, rendered by the painter as a sort of lewd exclamation point. For a later series done in the late ’90s and early 2000s, she mined Bob Guccione ’s ’70s-era Penthouse pinups for source material, a choice she says she may never live down (it’s a sticky fact people tend to associate with her: “‘Isn’t she the chick that does the Penthouse paintings?’” she mimics). The market for her work is robust, and many critics are in her corner, but detractors tend to be vitriolic. A 2007 headline in the Washington Post framed the debate in no uncertain terms: “Lisa Yuskavage: critiquing prurient sexuality, or disingenuously peddling a soft-porn aesthetic?”

Her latest show, then, is a bit of a plot twist. In 2018, Yuskavage mounted an exhibition of small paintings at New York’s David Zwirner gallery, and on a lark, included some landscape studies she had made over the years and stuffed away in a drawer. That show led to her latest museum exhibition, “ Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness ,” a survey of the artist’s little-highlighted landscape practice, which goes up this month at the Aspen Art Museum before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art in September. The show includes a few seemingly earnest “Sunday painter”-style sunsets, but most of the other works openly toy with rigid notions of genre. There’s a series of early watercolors, “ Tit Heaven ” (1991-1994), in which Yuskavage camouflaged female body parts into dreamy deconstructed still lives so that breasts and noses rise like landmasses from surreal jumbles of flowers and fruit. She’ll also show a number of more recent large-scale paintings in which, inspired by the freewheeling cartoonish tableaux made by the abstract expressionist Philip Guston late in his life, she’s liberated her subjects, once trapped in tightly cropped close-ups, to wander in acid green fields and misty clearings. These can be read as mindscapes as much as landscapes, seemingly populated by elements of Yuskavage’s psyche: Her id-like nymphets bump up against censorious, finger-wagging brigades of peasant women and occasionally men — hapless tourists who have wandered into the wide shot. The survey’s newest work pulls back further: “ Landscape Painting ” (2019) depicts the interior of a room where a small framed pastoral scene hangs behind a busty woman, her nakedness amplified by her dangling necklace and lurid tan lines. She’s giggling, as if to say, “Don’t confuse this for a landscape painting!”

Yuskavage, ever mischievous, calls it “a shot across the bow.” Dressed in black, her hands smeared with paint, she sits in a dingy white armchair in the rear of her space, gazing at the canvas she’s been toiling over. Very large, very red, it depicts a studio scene, in which a shadowy naked male artist figure attends to a spot-lit female nude, possibly molding her into existence. The picture just clicked after months of giving Yuskavage trouble. “Painting isn’t like ice skating, where I’m trying to figure out how to do a triple axel,” she explains. “I have to make up a new step and then figure out how to land it.” As the elevated F train, almost close enough to touch, rumbled by her window, Yuskavage answered T’s artist’s questionnaire.

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Lisa Yuskavage 1962–

Wikipedia entry, introduction.

Lisa Yuskavage ( yə-SKAV-ij ; born 1962) is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for her figure paintings that challenge conventional understandings of the genre. While her painterly techniques evoke art historical precedents, her motifs are often inspired by popular culture, creating an underlying dichotomy between high and low and, by implication, sacred and profane, harmony and dissonance.

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Known for her often sexualized paintings of female figures, both real and imaginary. Her technique is focused on color and light effects. She typically works from photographs. She was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

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United States

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Lisa Yuskavage

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e.g. oil on canvas

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Lisa Yuskavage A No Man’s Land 1 2013

Lisa Yuskavage Kingdom 2006

Lisa Yuskavage Piggy Back 2006

Lisa Yuskavage Babie 2003

Lisa Yuskavage Big Northview 2001

Lisa Yuskavage Night Flowers 1999

Lisa Yuskavage Socialclimber 1998

Lisa Yuskavage Headshrinker 1998

Lisa Yuskavage Asspicker 1998

Lisa Yuskavage Motherfucker 1997

Lisa Yuskavage Foodeater 1996

Exhibitions

De Kooning to Today: Highlights from the Permanent Collection (2nd floor–Oct 2002)

Oct 9, 2002–Mar 1, 2003

Whitney Biennial 2000

Mar 23–June 4, 2000

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Lisa Yuskavage

(American, born 1962)

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Contemporary Art

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Artworks for Sale & Auction Results

Hippies , 2015

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Portrait of KK , 1998

Pleasure Wine & Arts

Hippies in tit heaven , 2015

Bonfire , 2018

Art Sudents , 2018

Blue Bunny , 1995

Wee Baby I , 2003

Greengrapes, 2008/2020 , last cast 2020

Baldwin Contemporary

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Hippies in Tit Heaven , 2015

Art Students , 2018

Hearth , 2020

David Zwirner

Two Prints by the Artist , 2001

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Kathy on a Pedestal , 2001

Sale Date: June 27, 2024

The Bad Habits , 1996–1998

Foodeater; and Laura and Shrink , 1996–1998

Bad Habits Facing West , 1996

Babie , 2004

Ukrainian Shirt , 2001

Tit Heaven #26 , 1993

Sale Date: June 11, 2024

Grace , 2001

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Asspicking; and Headshrinking, from The , 1996–1998

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In the Studio: Lisa Yuskavage

By Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest

A few years ago, I followed friends to a celebration, not knowing the occasion. Down the steps, at the back of the bar, people were making passionate speeches in honor of the birthday girl. “When I was pregnant, Lisa asked if she could watch me give birth,” one woman said. “She had seen a close friend die of AIDS in the same hospital, and wanted to see someone be born there. She was incredible in the delivery room, rubbing my feet, giving me ice chips, welcoming this baby into the world. The birth was intense but she was fearless, always there. When it was over, I saw her photographing still-lifes of the afterbirth next to a can of Dr. Pepper.” 

The toasts to Lisa continued with equal intensity, humor and electric devotion. “My kind of person!” I thought. Once the dancing started, I turned to the friend I’d come with and asked, “Who’s Lisa? She sounds amazing!” “Oh, it’s Lisa Yuskavage !” she laughed, and pointed to a woman dancing to a disco beat in the center of the room.

The facts of Yuskavage’s career are well known. She grew up in Juniata Park, a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, then earned a BFA in 1984 from the Tyler School of Art, followed by an MFA from Yale in 1986. She became a major force in figurative painting in the 1990s, amid a torrent of criticism from feminists who argued that her sexualized distortions of female bodies were detrimental to the cause—charges she refuses to refute or even directly engage. As a result, she often appears as a bad object in academic and critical circles, as either an incredibly dumb feminist or a brilliantly cynical misogynist. In 2007 the Washington Post published a “special report” titled “Lisa Yuskavage: Critiquing Prurient Sexuality, or Disingenuously Peddling a Soft-Porn Aesthetic?,” where scholar Amelia Jones discussed actively disliking her paintings (“Everybody knows they’re soft porn, because that’s the first thing everyone says about them”) while feeling frustrated by her inability to pin them down (“I refuse to react in a way that could be interpreted as orthodox feminism”). Jones’s consternation unwittingly echoes the statements that Yuskavage has made about her own work from the very beginning. Back in 1992, she told tema celeste magazine: “I offer no solution. I don’t believe there is one.” 

Through all this, I’ve come to see Yuskavage as existing beyond the goody two-shoes world of Art Since 1900 , living and working instead somewhere over the rainbow, where artists are having a lot of fun and not toeing any party line. When her work is seen as a whole, what first appears as chaos becomes a richly polyphonic worldview. Now we can do just that at “The Brood,” a 25-year survey that gathers diptychs, triptychs and a third form she calls “symbiotics” (single canvases engaging the concept of the diptych through intertwined figures). The show is currently at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Mass., and travels to the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis in the spring. We met to discuss the exhibition, and her art in general, last spring in her Brooklyn studio

In its entirety, Yuskavage’s world is a grand comedy—rife with fantastical visions of both sunshine and shit worthy of François Rabelais. Her characters have Pantagruel’s appetite, humor and—most important—that giant’s heart. The artist’s presence with one friend as he died of AIDS, and with another as she gave birth, recalls the famous story of J.M.W. Turner strapping himself to the mast of a ship during a storm to experience the sublime. The difference is that Turner’s sublime was out there , in the vast tumult of a hostile landscape, while Yuskavage’s is in here , at the core of our basic, vital humanity.

JARRETT EARNEST   When you were a guest speaker in my class at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU) last year you talked about Giovanni Bellini, whom you described as “a man of deep feeling and great awe.” I think that has something to do with your ideas about belief in art. 

LISA YUSKAVAGE  I’ve come to experience art like a séance. Over time you can meld minds with artists: you laugh and feel their humor, or you are shocked by their sadness and grief. The main thing that comes across in Bellini’s paintings is the awesome potency and profound depth of feeling that made them. I’ve spent a good deal of my life looking at paintings, and what stands out to me is that, no matter when the painters lived, there are a lot of similarities among them. The work carries markers of the artist’s inner life—be it Carroll Dunham’s or Giovanni Bellini’s—for us to connect to. I find that humanity in art very appealing because it just cuts away all the layers of academia. Scholarship can buoy understanding in some ways but after a point can also drag you down, away from the art. Since contemporary artists are not hired by, say, the Vatican, we have the freedom to ask ourselves what we believe in and then to assert that belief. It’s actually a powerful liberty to own, and especially nice in our time when there are so many women’s voices in the mix.

The best paintings of depositions, crucifixions and entombments are images that are familiar if you’ve ever buried someone you love. Just today, I saw an image in the New York Daily News of the brother of Moises Locón Yac, who was killed in the explosion on Second Avenue on March 26, collapsing in the arms of a Red Cross worker. You see the same configuration in paintings of Mary Magdalene mourning Christ. I remember things through great pictures. When I look at Renaissance masterpieces I recall scenes like the one on Second Avenue—the profound grief of families realizing that their loved ones have been killed.

EARNEST   The narrative parts of those paintings are usually understood iconographically, through the signs and symbols that let you know that the woman depicted is Mary Magdalene, for instance. Aside from that kind of literary content, I know you are as interested in the formal elements of the painting—how color, line and composition make up the image. Can belief be discussed in formal terms?

YUSKAVAGE   Painters have always had to believe in formal language. It just didn’t used to be called into question as much as it is now. It is a belief that pictures can be formally coded and tell a story, and that viewers will understand that code even if they are not painters themselves. In contemporary art the language of painting is like a dialect of ancient Greek—most people just don’t understand it. Furthermore I don’t know how many people are willing to relax and let the meaning of the painting unfold, but I like to think they will feel the power of the form, almost unconsciously, whether they want to or not. 

EARNEST   I’ve been thinking about the obvious aspects of painting, how it materializes things out of color. That’s something that happens vividly in your recent paintings, like Hippies [2013] and Mardi Gras Honeymoon [2015], where color asserts itself as a powerful generative force.

YUSKAVAGE   The interesting thing about Hippies is how those male figures jump out from behind the central woman, and the painting did that to me—in the process of making it, the men said, “Ta-da!” They came out of the work. And I had to ask myself where to take it next. I think that Hippies should have come after the portraits it was shown with at David Zwirner this spring, but it didn’t, it came first. I decided to make six to eight portraits of incubi and succubae using the structural idea of a grisaille painting with a flourish of what is called cangiantismo, a sort of spectral color-wheel effect that contrasts the grays. In the 16th century the Italian viewer understood it as a signal that the supernatural had arrived.

I’ve done grisaille paintings with flashes of intense color over the years. One painting like that would surface as an isolated element in a body of work every now and then. When Hippies appeared I wanted to see what would happen if I just stayed with it and didn’t let up. I really didn’t know where I was going, but at some point the art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné came to my studio and said it reminded him of the “Bad Babies” series [1991-92]. Both groups of paintings personify color. I remember looking at my palette table and telling Christian, “I just want to make this come alive.” It’s such a stupid idea, and yet I think that is what I did. I just had to keep believing in it. When things went wrong, when they veered off course, I would tell myself to just trust the process. 

So much of my work is about doing the very obvious. Making art is like finding your Excalibur, the sword in the stone. It’s right there and others can tug and tug, but you have to be Arthur to pull it out. Anyone can decide, intellectually, to make paintings where “colors come alive as characters”—but try to do it! Few people can pull it off. You have to have lived your life in a certain way, and have believed all along that that is possible, in order to make it work. 

EARNEST   One thing that helps me make sense of the moral, erotic and political complexity of your paintings is your interest in the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The group of actors he worked with accumulated an emotional power from film to film. They didn’t necessarily play the same character, but the actors nevertheless carried a certain emotional and symbolic significance into each new situation. I was thinking about “Bad Habits” [1997-2000], the paintings that use figures from a series of small sculptures you made. I wondered if that is how you thought of them?

YUSKAVAGE   That was partly why I made the “Bad Habits” sculptures in 1995. In going from painting to painting I was “recasting” my characters every time. I had to get to know them one by one and understand what they mean. I realized through Fassbinder that it would be interesting to have your blonde—your Hanna Schygulla—as one person in an ensemble of actors who each play a range of characters. The range should be small—you can’t make people be something they’re not. Fassbinder was aware of how to use everyone’s qualities. Their fading looks, like Fassbinder’s own physical deterioration, became his material. They all had to be very smart and not vain to allow this to happen. Fassbinder’s actors came from the theater and theater is close to sculpture, so perhaps they had an awareness of the sculptural properties of their bodies.

I arranged the “Bad Habits” figurines into groups, which I studied to make the paintings. I was thinking about how Tintoretto made wax figures to illuminate scenes and understand complicated lighting. “Bad Habits” is about light. To keep my focus on that aspect of the work, I didn’t want to have to keep reinventing characters. I could have kept working on that series forever but I made myself stop. I realized that as an artist I was about more than that, so I forced myself to move on.

EARNEST   Fassbinder’s films are melodramas, with actors performing emotional extremes. As an audience member, I find it extraordinarily affecting—I cry real tears for them. The emotional connection of melodrama seems close to what you want from painting.

YUSKAVAGE   One of the ideas about art that was gaining momentum when I was student, which I heard but didn’t take seriously, was that psychology has no place in painting. And so, as a 19-year-old, I responded by putting it back there, boldly and for no good fucking reason. 

Cool kids always think their shit doesn’t stink, but Fassbinder reminds us that our shit does stink, and on top of that it’s rotten, and it’s OK to admit that. We’re all human. I’m interested in formal language and emotional content—formalism and feelings have a perfect marriage, if you can handle it. Looking back, I realize how much of the work was led by a rather dry and clear process and yet the results are anything but dry. I set a path and let the weirdness and eccentric stuff come up on its own; all that content just found a place out of the orderly way I had set up the process.

EARNEST   Contrary to what many people might think, I know you and your paintings are concerned with humanity and moral complexity. How do you characterize that part of your work?

YUSKAVAGE   I love Solzhenitsyn’s writing for his insights into morality and humanity, and today I came across a quote from The Gulag Archipelago : “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I love that idea. If you think of yourself as “good,” you should think about how easily you could be evil under different circumstances. It’s important to embrace the range and try to comprehend it. Philip Guston said something similar when he talked about imagining himself like Isaac Babel, who wrote about riding around with the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet War, witnessing rape, pillage and killing. Guston was able to envision himself not only through the lens of the Italian painters he adored, but through the hooded figures of Ku Klux Klan. He recognized that the enemy lies within.

EARNEST   If imagining the Cossacks allowed Guston to confront violent evil in his work, what is the equivalent for you?

YUSKAVAGE   Misogyny. There is no exact parallel to the story. I didn’t read a great writer like Babel who contextualized it for me. What I learned from Guston is that if you point the finger at yourself first, then you are freer. Misogyny is so rampant, extreme and insidious that it doesn’t get called out nearly enough. A lot of men, including gay men, are misogynists, and a lot of women are too. I’ve experienced it personally from so many, and I can therefore assume that because I live in this society I must have absorbed it too, so if I want to talk about misogyny I have to first acknowledge the aspects of it I’ve absorbed. I’m not the kind of person or artist, nor do I admire the kind of person or artist, who proselytizes, pontificates or points outward at others. I admire Guston and Diane Arbus and Fassbinder because they show a myriad of internal conflicts. That’s what art is—a struggle filtered through the self. That is how it becomes generous.

EARNEST   In your “Penthouse” series—which includes Day and Night [both 1999-2000]—you translated pin-ups into your painterly idiom. Is the idea of the internal struggle why it was important to you that the figures in these paintings come from issues of porn magazines you found as a little girl, magazines that belonged to your father and your friends’ fathers?

YUSKAVAGE   Yeah. Next question.

EARNEST   At BHQFU you described artists as “we people who are feeling . . .”

YUSKAVAGE   Empaths—

EARNEST   Is that part of what you think it means to be an artist?

YUSKAVAGE   Some artists would say that it’s the most ridiculous thing they’ve ever heard. But you’re asking this artist, and I would say, yes, absolutely. There are no rules to being an artist—every artist has a different role to play. And empathy is definitely a big part of mine.

EARNEST   How does belief come into play in your studio, while you’re painting?

YUSKAVAGE   I often wish I could go to my studio and paint all the time, but I can’t. I often feel disconnected, as if I’m waiting for instructions. It’s absolute torture. The first third of the time it took to make these recent paintings was spent going in every day but ending up with nothing. Then, slowly, something started to happen. 

There are great Caravaggios in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome—the Saint Matthew cycle. The first painting, on the left of the small chapel, is The Calling of Saint Matthew. Jesus points at Matthew, who sits across from him with his head down. Matthew is the only one who isn’t looking at Jesus. On the opposite wall, on the right side of the chapel, hangs the third painting that shows the end of the narrative, Matthew’s martyrdom: Matthew lies on the ground and some guy with a sword is standing over him, just about to murder him. Imagine how you’d feel in that moment! I stared at the painting for so long, fascinated by how everyone is freaking out except for Matthew, who is reaching up. What is he looking at? It’s an angel leaning over a cloud and extending a palm, as if holding a stick to a drowning man. You realize that Matthew is a man who lived and died with belief in eternal salvation, which is why he’s being murdered—he’s dying for his beliefs. It’s interesting that Caravaggio depicts him seeing his salvation. Everyone else sees horror and chaos, but Matthew sees an angel extending a palm. In this painting you witness him becoming something. 

So, to answer your question, when I think of being an artist, I think of the central painting, between those two, showing Saint Matthew as an old man taking dictation from an angel, doing divine work on earth. The man depicted in the painting is a nincompoop and the angel is impatiently counting on his fingers, as if Matthew isn’t keeping up. It’s so funny: that’s Caravaggio’s wit. The Passion of Saint Matthew is one of the most beautiful testaments we have, but here he is shown as a very ordinary man. I believe Caravaggio related to Matthew because of how beautifully this story is depicted, with so much feeling and sensitivity. The three paintings show the utter transformation of a man over time.

EARNEST   I can’t imagine belief as having any part in the postmodern conversation at Yale when you were a graduate student there in the ’80s. How did it go over?

  YUSKAVAGE   Ever since we were at Yale together, John Currin has said he admires my ability to believe. I remember once in a critique of my work, my teacher William Bailey was furious that it didn’t have enough “fiction building.” He quoted Magritte: “ Ceci n’est pas une pipe , Lisa!” I said, “But I want the paintings to be real!” To which he snapped, “Well, that’s not a good goal.” John was at that critique, and he jumped in, saying: “I actually think it’s amazing she thinks they’re real!” 

It was a very important argument for me, because I understood that there is an orthodox way of looking at things: “This is a representation. This is not a pipe, it’s a painting. It’s not real ,” which feels pretty obvious and rather dull at this point. There was this other possibility that seemed juicier and more fucked up and hopeful. And I did have to come to a synthetic approach to making, but once I could do that, I could also believe in painting again, and make it real again. I’ve taken it to that next step, and my gamble is to succeed or fail at that .

“Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood,” at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham. Mass., through Dec. 13, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis , Jan.15- Apr. 10, 2016.

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b. 1962, United States

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Lisa Yuskavage Biography

New York-based Lisa Yuskavage is a figurative painter minutely versed in the history of the medium, channelling artists from Francisco de Goya to Édouard Vuillard and Philip Guston in her ostensibly kitschy canvases. With references also ranging from old master paintings to 1970s soft porn, her paintings are immediately recognisable for their absurdly proportioned naked and semi-clad women, but also for acid-bright landscapes, uncanny interiors and hippie figures that seem to have been cross-pollinated with religious icons.

She sensitively deploys colour to convey the emotional states of her figures who appear alone, in pairs or in tableaux, and who in more recent times, have begun to include men. In addition to the figures' delight in their own fleshiness, there is also an overpowering sense of otherworldliness at play in her use of colour and form.

Yuskavage earned her BFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 1984 and her MFA at Yale University School of Art in 1986. Her breakthrough came in the early 90s, with The Ones That Shouldn't: The Gifts (1991) and the 'The Ones That Don't Want To' series (1991—2), the latter of which the artist also refers to as her 'Bad Babies'. The earlier work shows a large-breasted young woman emerging from a rich green background with a sprig of flowers stuffed in her mouth and her arms pulled behind her back. 'The Ones That Don't Want To' paintings, meanwhile, are shockingly vibrant portraits of girls naked from the waist down, who appear to be merging with their pulsating backgrounds and stare (with the exception of one slightly more dreamy figure) disconcertingly at the viewer.

Rising to prominence around the same time as other figurative painters such as Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin, in the 1990s Yuskavage commanded solo shows at galleries in New York, Santa Monica, Milan and London. In 2000, she held an important solo in her hometown of Philadelphia, at the Institute of Contemporary Art. 'I confirmed for myself that she paints wonderfully, and that wonderful painting is what concerns her,' wrote Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker at the time.

Notable other solo exhibitions have taken place at Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2002); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); and The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2011). A major survey spanning 25 years of of Yuskavage's work titled The Brood opened at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University in 2015 (12 September—13 December 2015), and later traveled to Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (15 January—3 April 2016). An in-depth book was published by Skira Rizzoli in association with the Rose Art Museum.

Yuskavage's work is held in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Long Museum, Shanghai; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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For Lisa Yuskavage, art isn’t about being right or wrong – it’s the freedom to do what you want

Lisa Yuskavage photographed at her studio in December 2020. Courtesy David Zwirner; © EJCamp2021

From the February 2021 issue of  Apollo . Preview and subscribe here .

S ometime not long ago, before the pandemic rendered such gatherings unconscionable, I met up with a few fellow critics for drinks at a friend’s house. At one point in the evening, during a boisterous discussion about artists’ personal politics, someone casually remarked that so-and-so was ‘definitely a misogynist’, and everyone roundly agreed before cantering on with the conversation.

I didn’t catch the name of the artist to whom they were referring, except that it was that of a woman. The next day, I couldn’t stop wondering about the comment, and about the consensus that had immediately formed in the room. (All present were men.) Who was this well-known female misogynist? How and why did her irrefutable misogyny manifest? Consumed by curiosity, I emailed a friend to ask if he remembered who they were talking about. He told me it was Lisa Yuskavage. Many months later, when Yuskavage picks up the phone at her second home on the North Fork of Long Island, I still cannot decide whether to mention this story.

Though I was never sure how to pronounce her name (which is Lithuanian, and rhymes with ‘savage’), I have known Yuskavage’s paintings since the late 1990s, when the New York-based artist, now 58, was enjoying growing market success and not a little critical notoriety alongside other figurative artists such as Elizabeth Peyton, Rachel Feinstein, Cecily Brown, Inka Essenhigh and John Currin (the odd man out, as a man). Images of Yuskavage’s work often appeared in art-school lectures or books about the complicated condition of third-wave feminism, under the rubric of which heterosexual women were owning their sexuality in a manner once scorned by traditional, academic feminists, and were reclaiming language, imagery and stereotypes that had previously been considered demeaning.

Kingdom (2005), Lisa Yuskavage. Private collection. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; © Lisa Yuskavage

Yuskavage’s paintings, as you also probably know, almost always feature happily naked and amply proportioned female models, often with legs spread and nipples pointing upward at improbable angles. ‘Girls with women’s bodies […] women with girls’ faces,’ as Helen Molesworth puts it in the catalogue for the artist’s most recent museum show, ‘Wilderness’, which opened at the Aspen Art Museum last year and which travels in a modified form to the Baltimore Museum of Art next month (28 March–19 September). For many, Yuskavage will forever be the artist who used Bob Guccione’s 1970s Penthouse pin-ups as subjects for a series of paintings in the 1990s, devoid of the expected irony or political approbation.

‘I’ve always sensed that I’m the kind of artist that a lot of people think they know everything about,’ Yuskavage tells me. But even a cursory scan through three decades of her work reveals how limited such conceptions are. For a start, while the female figure dominates, by no means all are pictured in pornographic or even erotic contexts. Some, such as G. With Flowers (2003) or Kathy Draped (2001) or the recent The Psychic (2020), are naturalistic and tenderly handled portraits; others, like Rapture #2 (1993) or Manifest Destiny (1997–98), are fantastical and hyperbolic fabrications that outstrip George Condo or Robert Crumb. In the past three years or so, men have increasingly entered her compositions, as characters no less sympathetic and vivid than any of her women.

Rapture #2 (1993), Lisa Yuskavage. Private collection. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; © Lisa Yuskavage

Two obvious challenges face any critic inclined to dismiss Yuskavage as misguided, misogynistic or somehow just plain bad . Firstly, there thrums an unmistakable fondness – admiration even – for the people in her pictures, even if she once described them as ‘half-retarded adolescents with their nipples popping out’. That’s just Lisa being Lisa, her friends would tell you. Whether drawn from life, or from found photographs, or from her imagination, you can see it in the realness of her characters’ faces, even at their most stylised; you see it in the glorious, proud beauty of their bodies, even as breasts sag or bellies swell more than the editors of Penthouse might have preferred. You see it in the seriousness and care with which she paints them: the gorgeousness of her colouration, her soft miasmas of light and her daring, taut compositions, as in the mysterious diptych Bonfire (2013–15). You see it most of all in the love – and there really is no better word for it – that the artist lavishes on every part of her canvas.

The second, closely related problem for naysayers is that Yuskavage is just so… good . If this sounds like an absurdly untenable judgement in today’s pluralistic art world, in her case it is as close to a solid fact as it is possible to get. She is a scrupulous student of her craft, researching source material deeply, working up preparatory drawings and paintings, and developing themes and motifs across multiple paintings. On her astoundingly exhaustive website, each work is cross-referenced with a handful of others, and tagged with a searchable taxonomy of categories and attributes.

Yuskavage is a painter’s painter, and a devotee of other painters, especially dead ones. Piero della Francesca, Giovanni Bellini, Jacopo Tintoretto, J.M.W. Turner, Édouard Vuillard, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Philip Guston, even Marcel Duchamp, are just some of the countless artists whose lessons she has internalised. As ‘Wilderness’ co-curator Christopher Bedford has observed, Yuskavage deploys techniques such as sfumato – borrowed from Leonardo – in the interiors of her Northview series (1999–2005), and cangiantismo , developed by Michelangelo and widely used by Pontormo, in paintings such as Participants (2013) or Dude of Sorrows (2015). It is hard to avoid the sense that Yuskavage, in her seemingly boundless ambition, puts herself in competition with the Old Masters.

The Tongue Tondo (2018), Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; © Lisa Yuskavage

In conversation, Yuskavage can be both self-deprecating and assertive, circumspect and brassily unfiltered. When she first calls me, she’s out in the pitch-black Long Island night with her cockapoo. ‘Phillip, take a piss for God’s sake, it’s freezing out here!’ she yells at the dog, who is pickily selecting a spot to do his evening business.

She politely rejects my suggestion that what elevates her pictures of lowbrow subject matter is her masterful technique. ‘I actually think what makes me a good painter, if I am one – it’s not technical. Technical is all fine and good, but I think it’s the way that I construct a picture. The things that I do or do not put in it.’ Those decisions are made not via the hand, but in the mind; Yuskavage credits her analytical thinking in part to a 27-year course of therapy that she embarked on during a crisis early in her career, and which she ended just three years ago.

In 1990, four years out of her MFA at Yale, Yuskavage had her first New York show at Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, of paintings of abstracted female bodies retreating demurely into fields of rich colour. Outwardly, the exhibition appeared a huge success, but Yuskavage walked into her opening and realised she hated it. She sank into a deep depression and, for a while, gave up painting. She was saved by a therapist who was herself just completing her training, and so was very cheap. By talking analytically about herself, a couple of times a week, Yuskavage says, ‘I really hit on certain things. Part of what I understood was wrong, was how somehow at Yale, I became kind of embarrassed by my class.’ Having identified that embarrassment, she wrapped both arms around it, and did her utmost to replicate it for viewers of her paintings, regardless of their gender, sexual preference or background.

Taste, class and embarrassment remain central concerns within Yuskavage’s work. She grew up in Philadelphia, in the white working-class neighbourhood of Juniata Park. Her dad drove a truck delivering pies, and her mother was mainly a homemaker. They were supportive and proud, especially when she was accepted into the Tyler School of Art and then Yale. Yuskavage relates an anecdote from when her mother worked for a spell as a medical-records technician, and one day in the cafeteria pulled out a slide sheet of her daughter’s paintings, trying to encourage some of the doctors to buy them. Filling the awkward silence, her mother blurted out, ‘People think she was molested!’ Yuskavage continues: ‘Of course, Mom knows that I wasn’t molested, and she’s pretty certain that’s not the reason I was making the paintings, but they look at her and they say, “Actually that’s what I was thinking!”’

The Art Students (2017), Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; © Lisa Yuskavage

Why does Yuskavage make the paintings she does? It’s a question a friendly neighbour once asked her after innocently wandering into her studio. Yuskavage, flushed with embarrassment, couldn’t say. ‘I’m not gonna sit here and try to explain it because you’re gonna get bored.’ In most of her interviews she typically steers discussions towards how she makes her paintings rather than what she paints. ‘I don’t worry about it. I worry more about coming up with more interesting formal problems to solve. There is usually a thread that comes from earlier work. The work generates itself.’

Take, as an example, the painting that features on the cover of the catalogue for ‘Wilderness’. On a verdant plain, with mountains in the far distance, a young girl lies on her tummy, sucking contemplatively on a red lollipop, raising her splayed legs so the gusset of her blue panties is framed by her stripey socks. It is actually the left panel of a very large work, Triptych (2010–11), which began life as a study titled Safety Orange (2010), just 20cm wide. The tiny painting begat a large painting. Then Yuskavage heard a voice in her head: ‘There is more.’ Uh oh , she thought.

Triptych (2010–11), Lisa Yuskavage. Private collection. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; © Lisa Yuskavage

The canvas ended up as part of a triptych well over five metres across. The central panel is dominated by a woman on her back; her head hidden, we see only the V of her raised legs and, between them, her vagina. (Duchamp’s Étant donnés , 1946–66, to which this figure so clearly alludes, is one of the first artworks Yuskavage ever saw.) If, as Yuskavage suggests, this is the id, and the lollipop-sucker the ego, then to the right appears the superego: on a distant hill, in long skirts and headscarves, unsmiling peasant women look on with hands clasped. These figures, which reappear in other paintings, are what Yuskavage latterly came to call her ‘Nel’zahs’. The name was suggested by her husband, the painter Matvey Levenstein, who recalled the ‘old babushka ladies with slippers on’ they encountered on their honeymoon to Russia, in 1992. ‘Nel’zah!’ Yuskavage was always being told, especially in museums, especially when she peered too closely at paintings. Usually she just smiled, confused, with her bright white American smile. She asked Levenstein, who was born in Moscow, what the phrase meant. ‘Just don’t!’ was his best translation.

‘I’ve felt it all my life,’ Yuskavage says, ‘whether it’s just my own personality or because I’m a woman or because I am an aspiring working-class person trying to get into the fancy art world or whatever, it’s just this kind of getting knocked back with the chorus of “nos”. But not willing to really heed them.’

I never muster the courage to ask Yuskavage if she’s a misogynist. The question seems so flat-footed after consideration of the artist’s subtle, intelligent and irresolvably complicated paintings. It would feel gauche, in bad taste. And anyway, she’s freely admitted as much in the past. In an interview with the painter Chuck Close in 1996, she said: ‘I have no interest in pointing the finger anywhere but at myself, and telling about my crimes. I am interested in making work about how things are rather than how they should be. I exploit what’s dangerous and what scares me about myself: misogyny, self-deprecation, social climbing, the constant longing for perfection.’

Certainly, both the artist and viewer are ensnared in whatever toxicity is implied in her subjects, but also, maybe, emancipated through Yuskavage’s treatment of them. ‘I don’t work from an elevated place looking down,’ she said in an interview in 2000. ‘If they are low, then I am in the ditch with them, and by painting them, trying to dig us out together.’

Might any of Yuskavage’s pictures be considered self-portraits? The question is not easily answered, even if she has, in the past, emphasised the gulf of difference, physical and otherwise, between herself and her subjects. And yet. It is often mentioned that Yuskavage worked as a life model while in art school. To my knowledge, she has only ever painted white women, because, I assume, she herself is white. Even if they are not her, exactly, they are her people, her kin.

Self Portrait (2017), Lisa Yuskavage. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner; © Lisa Yuskavage

I ask about a painting from 2017, Self Portrait . A dark-haired nude woman poses in front of a camera on a tripod; looming behind her, ethereal but giant, is a man, also nude, his hands on her waist. Yuskavage is momentarily thrown by my reference to the painting, and then explains apologetically that she named it ‘on the fly’. The title is, in fact, brilliantly clever. The source image is from of a trove of slides Yuskavage acquired from Bob Guccione’s private collection. She professes a fascination for Guccione, who, she says, was a sophisticated photographer who understood light and reflection through studying paintings by Vermeer. ‘Nobody’s willing to talk about this because the high-lowness of this is so fucked up!’ she says. ‘If I was going to be Andrea Dworkin, I would say this was really bad for women. I just don’t make art thinking about what’s good for anybody or bad for anybody.’

Yuskavage discovered that in certain shoots, Guccione would photograph himself with his models. ‘He couldn’t help but put himself in the picture,’ she says. These unpublished slides set her thinking about her own authorship. On Self Portrait , which features a model named Lavinia, Yuskavage muses, ‘I’m the camera, I’m the paint, I’m the light, I’m Bob, I’m Lavinia, I’m all of them, I’m none of them. It’s a dream. It’s a painting. It’s all the same.’

Whether you think you like Yuskavage’s work or not, to take it seriously is to challenge profoundly one’s own preconceptions about the value of art, and the role and responsibility of the artist. What freedoms does the artist deserve? What personal virtues do we demand of her? And, by the way, since when was being an artist about being right or wrong? The more I spend time with Yuskavage’s painting, the more I feel exasperated by the contemporary art world, with its sanctimonious critical judgements based on banal moral orthodoxies. I don’t want what is good for me. And I don’t care about being right.

‘Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness’ is at Baltimore Museum of Art from 28 March–19 September.

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Lisa Yuskavage On Criticism, Courage And Her New Aspen Art Museum Show, 'Wilderness'

Lisa Yuskavage first became known for her paintings of provocative female nudes. Her new show at the Aspen Art Museum , “Wilderness,” focuses on a more under-the-radar aspect of her work: landscapes.

Edlis Neeson Arts and Culture Reporter Christin Kay: Your work is pretty provocative, and it was even seen as a joke by some people when you started. How did you develop courage and conviction?

Lisa Yuskavage: At first, you know, I made work and I was shocked by the criticism. I was like, “Whoa, these people are really mad at me!” And then I was like, well, look, Yuskavage, if you throw a hard punch, something is going to come back at you. I just kind of got used to it and started to embrace it. 

I won't say I’d miss it if it doesn’t happen again, I'm not gonna lie! You know, no artist wants anything but to be loved. That is a fact. We're not striving to be hated; to connect to the world is an extremely positive thing for an artist. 

Also, all of those challenges kept me trying to figure out how to be clear to myself, and I learned how not to feel indebted to my viewers or the people who are my supporters because if they weren't there, I had to only really think about what the work needed next.

CK: This show at the Aspen Art Museum, "Wilderness," calls attention to landscapes.What’s it like to focus on this part of your work that tends to go unnoticed? 

LY: Because it's a survey of my work, you choose a way to look at the work that opens up one's understanding of what I'm doing. The show is co-curated by Christopher Bedford from the Baltimore Museum and Heidi Zuckerman at the Aspen Art Museum, although she's no longer at the Aspen Art Museum. Heidi looked at a show that I had last year at David Zwirner Gallery of 90-some small paintings. And, in that. she noticed a use of sunrises, sunsets, moonscapes. 

But when we decided to do [Wilderness], I said, well, I'm interested in this theme as long as this is not as a way to censor what my work is as a totality because I don't think of my work as sexy. I think of it as telling a story that actually hasn't been told before.

CK: You gave an artist’s talk at the Aspen Art Museum last fall, and you said you learned when you were a younger artist that you couldn't not be in your work, even if it was like a still life or a landscape. How do we see you in “Wilderness”?

LY: Art comes from three points. One is other artwork, and then there is a second point, which is the world around us. And there's a third point -- the inner life of an artist. So my own inner life is a story of a painter who happens to be a girl. And there haven't been that many of us. So that is a story. sometimes sometimes sexy, sometimes tragic. And I think that in general, the landscape provides an opportunity to really depict state of mind.

Lisa Yuskavage

Works by lisa yuskavage at sotheby's.

Lisa Yuskavage Biography

“I exploit what's dangerous and what scares me about myself,” says contemporary figurative painter Lisa Yuskavage. “Misogyny, self-deprecation, social climbing, the constant longing for perfection.” Her unsettling, unmistakeable characters – at once babyish and hyper-sexualized, kitschy and classically-inflected – have both cleaved to and cleaved apart time-honored conventions of pictorial skill, composition, and taste for over three decades.

Lisa Yuskavage was born in Philadelphia on May 16, 1962, received a BFA from Temple in 1984, and an MFA from Yale in 1986. Since the early 1990s, she has been associated with a revival of figurative painting in contemporary art; her technique has been likened to the Italian mannerists, among other erudite art historical references, while her work evinces an equal if not greater engagement with cheap and nasty mass culture. Theoretically, her work investigates the psychology of viewership and in particular the fraught phenomenon of the male gaze – a line of inquiry that is complicated by her occasional inclusion of male figures, such as the besuited, reluctant man-child who is the subject of The Feminist Husband (1996) and a smaller study of that work puerilely titled Pussywhipped (both 1996).

Since 2005, Yuskavage's work has been represented by David Zwirner. Yuskavage's museum shows have included the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2006), the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin (2011) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (2020). Her work has also been accessioned into the permanent collections of such eminent institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Long Museum in Shanghai. Yuskavage currently lives and works in New York.

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Lisa Yuskavage

American | 1962

Selected Solo Exhibitions

• Lisa Yuskavage: Rendez-vous ,David Zwirner, Paris ,3e, Paris, France
• Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings ,David Zwirner, New York (533 W 19th Street) ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness ,Baltimore Museum of Art ,Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness ,Aspen Art Museum ,Aspen, Colorado, USA
• Lisa Yuskavage ,David Zwirner, London ,Mayfair, London, UK
• Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood ,CAM, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis ,St. Louis, Missouri, USA
• Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood ,The Rose Art Museum ,Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
• Lisa Yuskavage ,David Zwirner, New York (533 W 19th Street) ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Lisa Yuskavage ,Greengrassi ,London, UK
• Lisa Yuskavage: Tragic Land ,The Royal Hibernian Academy Galleries ,Dublin, Ireland
• Lisa Yuskavage ,David Zwirner, New York (525 W 19th Street) ,New York, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

• Couples Squared ,Southampton Arts Center ,Southampton, New York, USA
• David Zwirner: 30 Years ,David Zwirner, Los Angeles ,Los Angeles, California, USA
• Everyone Loves Picabia ,David Lewis Gallery (Walker St) ,Lower Manhattan, New York, USA
• The Infinite Woman ,Villa Carmignac ,Hyères, France
• 50 Paintings ,Milwaukee Art Museum ,Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
• In New York, Thinking of You ,The FLAG Art Foundation ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Roar! ,Jim Kempner Fine Art ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Necessary Angels: Jesse Murry & Lisa Yuskavage ,USF Contemporary Art Museum ,Tampa, Florida, USA
• Among Friends: Three Views of a Collection ,The FLAG Art Foundation ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Women Painting Women ,Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth ,Ft. Worth, Texas, USA
• The Real World ,David Zwirner, Hong Kong ,Central, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• And I Will Wear You in My Heart of Heart ,The FLAG Art Foundation ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• This is where I travelled. David Zwirner ,Tarmak22 ,Saanen, Switzerland
• Nasty Women ,Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles ,Downtown Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA
• 20/20 ,David Zwirner, New York (20th Street) ,New York, USA
• Drawing 2020 ,Gladstone Gallery, New York (21st Street) ,New York, USA
• (Nothing But) Flowers ,Karma Gallery, New York (172 E) ,New York, USA
• Walls of Smalls ,Gallery Neptune & Brown ,Washington D.C., District Of Columbia, USA
• ONLINE: I See You ,Victoria Miro, London ,Hoxton, London, UK
• All Of Them Witches ,Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (N. Orange Dr) ,Los Angeles, California, USA
• Singing the Body Electric ,David Zwirner, Hong Kong ,Central, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• The Gaze ,James Fuentes, New York (Delancey Str) ,Lower East Side, New York, USA
• Endless Enigma Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art ,David Zwirner, New York (519 W 19th Street) ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art ,Nicholas Hall ,Upper East Side, New York, USA
• Seed ,Kasmin Gallery, New York (293 10th Av) ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• From Muse and Myth to Figure and Gesture: 50 Years of Prints from the Permanent Collection ,Tampa Museum of Art ,Tampa, Florida, USA
• #WeDoo ,DIEHL (Niebuhrstrasse) ,Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany
• David Zwirner: 25 Years ,David Zwirner, New York (533 W 19th Street) ,New York, USA
• Thread Benefit Exhibition ,David Zwirner, New York (533 W 19th Street) ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Hidden and Revealed: Representations of Women by Women ,Angles Gallery ,Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California, USA
• Choice Works ,Mana Contemporary Jersey City ,Jersey City, New Jersey, USA
• SHE: Picturing women at the turn of the 21st century ,David Winton Bell Gallery, Brawn University ,Providence, Rhode Island, USA
• Disturbing Innocence ,The FLAG Art Foundation ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Love Story: Anne and Wolfgang Titze Collection ,Lower Belvedere ,Vienna, Austria
• ICA Collection: Expanding the Field of Painting ,Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston ,Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• The Road Ahead ,Roberts Projects ,Los Angeles, California, USA
• Secret Societies. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence ,SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt ,Frankfurt, Germany
• Images from a Floating World ,Fredericks & Freiser ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Between Picture and Viewer: The Image in Contemporary Painting ,School of Visual Arts, Chelsea Gallery ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Dirty Kunst ,Seventeen, London ,London, UK
• Size DOES Matter ,The FLAG Art Foundation ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Bad Habits ,Buffalo AKG Art Museum ,Buffalo, New York, USA
• The Female Gaze: Women Look at Women ,Cheim & Read ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Weighing and Wanting: SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION ,MCASD, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla ,La Jolla, California, USA
• Attention to Detail ,The FLAG Art Foundation ,Chelsea, New York, USA
• Out of Shape: Stylistic Distortions of the Human Form in Art from the Logan Collection ,Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center ,Poughkeepsie, New York, USA

Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings

David Zwirner

September 9 – October 23, 2021

• EXHIBITED WORKS
• INSTALLATION VIEWS
• PUBLICATIONS

Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture,

Scissor Sisters,

Bonfire Tondo,

The Fuck You Painting,

Red Photo Shoot,

Golden Dog Collar,

Master Class,

Yellow Studio,

Little Master Class,

Emerald Bonfire,

Wee Bonfire,

Wee Yellow Studio,

Pink Studio (Rendezvous),

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Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Lisa Yuskavage. On view at 533 West 19th Street in New York, this will be the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. In this exhibition, Lisa Yuskavage continues her long-standing exploration of what constitutes a model, exceptionally summoning the history of her own work as part of that process. Its two rooms are defined by contrasting moods that the artist has often intertwined within individual paintings, and which both engage with aspects of art making. The first includes a group of works that confront the viewer on varied levels, recalling the tension between seer and seen. Addressing issues of vulnerability, power, and rage, they reference an art-historical sub-tradition “in which rudeness fortifies erudition and corrosive humor strips humanism of all sentimentality,” exemplified by artists such as Francisco Goya and Philip Guston. 1 Read more

1 Quote provided by Yuskavage from Robert Storr, Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1983), p. 54.

Images: Lisa Yuskavage, Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture , 2018–2020 (detail). Lisa Yuskavage,  Yellow Studio , 2021 (detail). Lisa Yuskavage,  Pink Studio (Rendezvous) , 2021 (detail)

Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings , David Zwirner, New York, 2021

“[Yuskavage’s] big studio paintings are as much color studies as narratives. Different shades of the dominant color define the crisp forms of furnishings and reiterate color samples taped to the wall. Study the backgrounds for themselves; they are, in different ways, breathtaking.” —Roberta Smith, art critic

Lisa Yuskavage

Four new large-scale color-field compositions each depict an artist’s studio or art classroom. Combining a variety of processes, techniques, characters, and references, the works epitomize painting’s ability to compress time.

In these new works, Yuskavage mines her own image history, revisiting specific paintings from the past three decades by depicting them as works in progress within new narratives.

Lisa Yuskavage, Home , 2018 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage, Dude of Sorrows , 2015 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage, Big Blonde with Hairdo , 1994 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage mixes paint in her Brooklyn studio, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

“Yuskavage gives us a space where tactility reigns, both in the creaminess of her paint and the sumptuousness of her surfaces. The distinction between the skin of bodies and the skin of paint rides along a knife’s edge. Her universe is a continuation of the Rococo, a made-up world of adornment, flirtation, and play.” —Helen Molesworth, in Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness , the catalogue for Yuskavage’s current solo exhibition on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art through September 19, 2021

“Light for Yuskavage is alchemical. Like her great Venetian forebears, she finds in light the power to transform the visual image, to imbue it with mood.” —Marcia B. Hall, art historian

Lisa Yuskavage, Yellow Studio , 2021 (detail)

Gustav Eberlein, Boy with Thorn , 1879/1886. Nationalgalerie der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. Photo by Andres Kilger

The model’s pose in Yuskavage’s Yellow Studio recalls Boy with Thorn , a Hellenistic sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot that has been the subject of countless classical, Renaissance, and neoclassical reproductions.

“Ultimately, Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings are about the experience of the world we know through the prism of a studio known only to the artist. Hers are paintings of the mind that emerge as raw, public propositions from the most private of spaces.” —Christopher Bedford, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art

An easel in Yuskavage’s Brooklyn studio features a photograph of Georges Braque and a study for Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture , 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

These works take their point of departure in Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911) and The Pink Studio (1911), evoking the artist’s studio as a stand-in for the creative process.

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio , 1911. Installation view, Collection 1880s–1940s , The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar

The new works notably revisit specific paintings from Yuskavage’s Bad Baby series of models in explicit poses from the 1990s. One of Yuskavage’s earliest works, The Ones That Don’t Want To: Bad Baby (1992) is depicted on the back wall of Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture with its angry-looking model layered into a new, fictive whole.

As is often the case for Yuskavage’s depiction of couples, the relationship between the male and female figure appears psychologically charged and open-ended, just as it remains unclear who is the master and who is the student.

Lisa Yuskavage, Helga , 1993 (detail)

The woman’s face resembles the figure in the artist’s 1993 painting Helga (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), reinforcing the imagined world that Yuskavage has constructed.

Lisa Yuskavage, Master Class , 2021 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage, Beach Fire , 2012 (detail)

Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness , Aspen Art Museum, 2020

The fire displayed in a small painting on the central easel is a recreation of Yuskavage’s 2012 work Beach Fire , which was recently exhibited in Wilderness at the Aspen Art Museum and is currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

“In Yuskavage’s paintings, we experience the rage of seeing ourselves in the mirror, and the equal and opposite rage of not seeing ourselves in the mirror. Humiliation and fury often coexist in these paintings, as do tenderness and perversion, or familiarity and contempt.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, oncologist and writer

“Today her seductive, unsettling works constitute some of the most limpid, convincing painted fictions made in the last half century.” —Christian Viveros-Fauné, curator and critic

Lisa Yuskavage’s studio in New York, 2021. Photo by EJ Camp

Lisa Yuskavage, Bonfire , 2013–2015. Installation view, Knowledge of the Past Is the Key to the Future , The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2021

Summoning the history of her own work, Yuskavage relates the small-scale painting Bonfire Tondo to her 2013–2015 diptych Bonfire , which is currently on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

“Yuskavage creates environments in which intense colors trigger dynamic associations. She makes spaces that engulf and surround her characters but that also allow the viewer to decide what to focus on and in what order. She explains that when her paintings work, they create their own worlds—worlds that haven’t existed before. The landscapes she paints refer to places we may know, but they are also unlike any world we have ever known.” —Heidi Zuckerman, director of The Orange County Museum of Art

Lisa Yuskavage, Scissor Sisters , 2020 (detail)

“I’m interested in this idea of these images defending themselves.…  Violence and anger—anger in particular—is still one of the more controversial things in art, and I’m really interested in angry art.” —Lisa Yuskavage

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