Lisa Yuskavage
In 2018, Lisa Yuskavage described her lurid vision of the United States to the Wall Street Journal: “I think America has become the Wild West again—raping, pillaging.” Art as a wilderness, minus the explicit raping and pillaging, is the putative subject of her current traveling exhibition, jointly organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum. A show that focuses on the varied and increasingly complex ways this uniquely original artist has synthesized landscape and the female figure from the 1990s onward, her survey serves as a revamped Manifest Destiny for artists everywhere—as does her entire oeuvre. Her fearless example, forged through the thorny dos and don’ts attending the representation of women, has driven artistic expansion across several aesthetic continents. Like all great artists, Yuskavage’s individual pictures sometimes appear to anticipate historical events. Such is the case of Walking the Dog (2009). Behind the artist’s highly sexualized, apocalyptically hued figures lurk vivid Boschian scenarios.
— CVF, USFCAM
"'In the midst of an apocalypse, you still gotta walk the dog,' was a quote that I threw away as a lighthearted joke during a walk through of my exhibition Wilderness at the Aspen Art Museum. Never did I think it would become a dire reality within weeks of saying those words."
— Lisa Yuskavage
Lisa Yuskavage, 2018. Photo by Amanda Webster © Amanda Webster. Courtesy David Zwirner.
About Lisa Yuskavage
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1962)
Lisa Yuskavage lives and works in New York.
For more than thirty years, Lisa Yuskavage’s highly original approach to figurative painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre. Her simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. At times playful and harmonious, and at other times rueful and conflicted, these characters are cast within fantastical compositions in which realistic and abstract elements coexist and color determines meaning. Yuskavage’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico); and The Royal Hibernian Academy (Dublin, Ireland). Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, California); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC); Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, Massachusetts); Long Museum (Shanghai); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York); Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, California); The Museum of Modern Art (New York, New York); Rubell Family Collection (Miami, Florida); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York).
Artist website: yuskavage.com
Gallery website: davidzwirner.com