Time Out New York, review by Joseph R. Wolin
2011
Yuskavage's pneumatic nudes return, bigger than ever.
In Lisa Yuskavage's new exhibition, a jump in scale has made her signature combination of masterful style and dubious content—knowingly incorrect images of snub-nosed, hypersexualized nymphets—downright trippy. The ten-foot-wide canvas Outskirts, for example, depicts a pair of prepubescent twins sitting back-to-back, silhouetted against a setting sun in a baleful sky of acid yellow and umber. In the right foreground, a blond with pendulous tits sits on the rump of another woman on all fours who has flowers stuck in her anus, while in the background on the left, a male hiker leans on his walking stick. Simultaneously frothy, portentous and winking, the painting merges Fragonard, Frederic Church and a Playboy cartoon with the psychedelic charge of a head-shop poster. The artist's dexterity with the paintbrush almost seems like an extreme sport.
Green clouds and mountains dominate the view in the three-panel composition titled Triptych. On the right, a girl in a thong and striped socks sucks on a Blow Pop as she stares off into the distance; in the center, another figure lies on a table with her legs splayed, her fuchsia dress casually hiked up to offer a view of a hairless vagina. Beneath the table, a hodgepodge of studio objects—fruit, flowers, canvases, palettes—rest in the weeds, symbolic attributes of the figure above.
Art is an indolent whore, we're led to believe, in contrast with the industry of the doll-like peasant women in kerchiefs holding baskets of fruit as they gather the bounty of distant hillsides on the left. But we all know whom we'd rather spend our time with.