Lisa Yuskavage

One of the most original and influential artists of the past three decades, Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. On view in Los Angeles are both large and small-format paintings, each set within a fictionalized artist’s studio in which the depicted spaces become stages where Yuskavage’s rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are intertwined.

In several of the works in this exhibition, Yuskavage extends her 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.

Notebook (Loved) (2024) shows an enlarged sheet of notebook paper that serves as the backdrop for two figures. The paper features a sketch of a woman and a scrawl of text that is cut off by the frame. The incomplete inscription reads: “who was loved ... too much.” An avid archivist, Yuskavage unearthed the page in a notebook of hers from the late 1980s.

The exhibition also features a selection of new and recent smaller paintings, which have been a constant and integral part of Yuskavage’s practice since the mid-1980s. While some are directly related to 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. 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.

At times playful and harmonious, other times rueful and conflicted, Yuskavage’s rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements. With painterly techniques that evoke art-historical precedents alongside motifs inspired by popular culture, her works create an underlying dichotomy between high and low and, by implication, sacred and profane, harmony and dissonance.