The outrageously talented Lisa Yuskavage has been flouting and exalting figurative painting for nearly two decades, in luminous, color-soaked scenes of female nudes that are equal parts kitsch (imagine a Hummel figurine posing for Penthouse) and Old Master (art critics drop names from Vermeer to Pontormo). She does have detractors. "Who could paint so conservatively after the events of the twentieth century?" a well-known formalist recently asked me, as if Greenbergian flatness were a moral imperative. (In 2009, Yuskavage lampooned such critiques as a pie in the face of her figures, which she portrayed with whipped-cream-smeared kissers rendered in Ab Ex-like brushstrokes.) In the artist's new show at Zwirner, the future of painting has rarely looked brighter—more complex, more limitless. Think of her canvases, as lusciously perverse as ever, as exquisite corpses, seamlessly folding art-historical bodies into the pictures. Note the brazen young woman in "Fireplace," with the stone-cold flesh of Manet's "Dead Christ with Angels" and the beribboned neck of "Olympia."