Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage
Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner Gallery, 2011
Born	(1962-05-16) May 16, 1962 (age 55) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Education	Tyler School of Art Yale School of Art
Known for	Painting

Lisa Yuskavage (LĒS-ə yus-KĀ-vij) is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for her figurative paintings and figure paintings, in which seemingly ignoble subjects are depicted with classic, historical techniques, resulting in exquisitely painted, visually paradoxical canvases.

Yuskavage was born in 1962 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She attended the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and studied abroad during her third year through the Tyler School of Art’s program in Rome, before obtaining her BFA in 1984. Yuskavage received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1986.

Since the early 1990s, Yuskavage has shaped her own genre of the nude—voluptuous, erotic, cartoonish, angelic young women, and more recently men, cast within atmospheric landscapes that appear part fiction, part real. She is widely associated with a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting, and her complex, psychologically-charged narratives are often cinematic in scope, with the plots revealing themselves slowly. Of the artist’s paintings, critic Roberta Smith has written: "The combination of mixed subliminal messages, deliciously artificial color and forthright sexuality is characteristic of Ms. Yuskavage's work, as is the journey from high to low to lower culture within a relatively seamless whole."

Yuskavage’s oeuvre is characterized by her ongoing engagement with the history of painting, and in particular the genre of the nude, which for centuries was shrouded as religious subject matter. Yet her paintings also encompass landscape and still life genres, and all three often appear within a single work. Yuskavage’s unique use of color is imbedded in Renaissance techniques as well as Color Field painting, and she cites diverse inspirations, including Italian painter Giovanni Bellini, Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, and French painter Edgar Degas.

Critics have responded to Yuskavage’s works with diverse interpretations, many of which rely on binaries to capture the surreal nature of her subject matter; these descriptions include: “alienation and affection”, “self-love and self-loathing”, and “vulgarity and earnestness”. Theoretically, her paintings are associated with psychologically driven theories of viewing, such as that of the gaze. However, the complexities inherent in her paintings deny singular interpretation; as curator and critic Christian Viveros-Fauné explains: “Yuskavage’s oeuvre... succeeds exactly to the degree that it refuses to be pinned down to any one of its many conflicted meanings. ‘I only load the gun’, [Yuskavage] has been known to say to those who insist on viewing a painting as an explanation.”