ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Lisa Yuskavage

One of the most original and influential artists of the past three decades, Lisa Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. At once exhibitionist and introspective, her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements, in which color is the primary vehicle of meaning.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery

In Lisa Yuskavage’s solo exhibition are on view large and small-format paintings. Each painting is set within a fictionalized artist’s studio in which the depicted spaces become stages where characters from Yuskavage’s oeuvre are intertwined. “Painter Painting” (2024), one of the new large-scale works in the exhibition, envisions a monumental grisaille in front of which an artist (a self-portrait of Yuskavage in a lab coat) is at work. The painting within the scene is based on a black-and-white photograph that Yuskavage took in 1995 of one of her “Bad Habits” sculptural maquettes, “The Motherfucker.” The sculptures began as a group of Sculpey clay figurines that the artist created in 1995 (later cast in Hydrocal as an editioned work in 1996) and they have subsequently appeared as subjects in many of her works, most notably from 1996 to 1999. Expanding the self-referential play within this studio narrative, Yuskavage includes a mimetic version of the original photograph, which is shown taped to the surface of the oversized grayscale painting. The Bad Habits sculpture itself is visible on a pedestal on the right side of the composition. In “In the Company of Models” (2024), Yuskavage includes her seminal 1995 painting “Rorschach Blot”, which can be seen leaning against the wall at an angle amid other works in progress. Yuskavage contrasts the lemony-yellow surface of that work with a wall painted in minty greens from which materializes a figure, who is based on an image of her at nineteen years old as a model in art school. This figure’s dress, painted in similar luminous greens, is reminiscent of the starched nightgown worn by the subject in Yuskavage’s “Transference Portrait of My Shrink in Her Starched Nightgown with My Face and Her Hair” (1995), the pendant painting to “Rorschach Blot”. These paired works were first exhibited together at Yuskavage’s 1996 solo exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica—a nod to the artist’s history in Los Angeles. Another imagined version of one of Yuskavage’s Bad Habits sculptures is shown here in profile to the right of another of the artist’s notable figurative motifs, a female nude in beaded panties. In both “Painter Painting” and “In the Company of Models” as well as several other works in this exhibition, Yuskavage extends these meditations on the nature of her work and art making more broadly through the presence of arrays of monochromatic canvases that she frequently depicts propped up against each other in dense groupings. These monochromes at once reference color theory and the artist’s own working process, in which she builds up her compositions from a solid ground, applying layers of paint to achieve the luminosity and distinctive color saturation that are hallmarks of her works. This visual and narrative device is foregrounded in “Morning Classes in New Haven: In the Department of Color Theory” (2024), where a cascade of these empty canvases—rendered in cadmiums of all sort: yellows, golds, tangerines, and salmon pinks—proliferate next to two figures: a crouching model in front of an older model who is standing. Paradoxically, the cadmium-yellow light monochrome square at the front of the group is actually an exposed section of the overall underpainting. Behind the posing models is a large work in progress in jewellike green tones that seems to visually quote from several of the artist’s works from the early 2010s, which show groups of disapproving peasants, or “Nel’zahs.” In addition to these and other larger paintings, the exhibition features a selection of new and recent smaller paintings. While some are directly related to their larger counterparts or sources of inspiration for the works in the show, others are one-of-a-kind compositions that exist only on an intimate scale. Notable among these new small-format works are two rare multipanel paintings: the diptych “Five Nudes a Painter and a Pieface” (2024) and the triptych “Endless Studio” (2024). As places for exploring color, form, and characters, these small paintings play a remarkably dynamic and protean role within Yuskavage’s oeuvre, continuously inspiring new pictorial developments.

Photo: Lisa Yuskavage , Pink Studio (Rendezvous), 2021, Oil on linen, 70 x 77 inches (177.8 x 195.6 cm), Signed and dated verso, © Lisa Yuskavage, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 18/2-12/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/