In David Cronenberg's 1979 film The Brood a controversial psychotherapist accidentally calls forth a litter of killer children from the body of a disturbed patient by uncorking her repressed demons. In Lisa Yuskavage's identically titled Rose Art Museum survey, the artist arrays some of the more grotesque, gorgeously painted creatures she has spawned over the last quarter century. The show is a trailer that offers career highlights, but it makes an unflaggingly forceful point. Few pictures painted by anyone anywhere today produce the mental havoc engendered by Yuskavage's exquisitely wanton creatures.
Yuskavage is a commanding presence among contemporary artists. As a painter, she reinvented the modern figure (mostly female, in her case) together with a handful of other 1990s brush-and-canvas radicals (including Neo Rauch, Chris Ofili, and John Currin). As a conceptualist, she out-transgressed most art polemicists and feminists, both of her and subsequent generations. Rough mischief served up with masterful skill has, over time, become the artist's painterly signature—an achievement akin to doing dirty stand-up comedy in rhyming couplets. And like a filthy joke that gets beautified (The Aristocrats comes to mind), Yuskavage's penchant for combining bravado with impishness has influenced other artists.
Looking back, it's clear that Yuskavage pioneered once barren artistic territory now claimed by loads of artists. Among the non-painters are figures like Jordan Wolfson, whose creepy yet alluring animatronic stripper sculpture could have easily been inspired by one of Yuskavage's bodacious freaks.
Within her own medium, the Philadelphia-born, Yale-educated artist's influence appears both general and specific—like the color of the sky or the average woman's self-image. On the one hand, it's unthinkable to conceive of today's well-behaved expressionistic pictures—like, say, those of painter Dana Schutz—without Yuskavage’s trailblazing example. On the other, the veteran artist's Trojan Horse aesthetic, which subtly conveys low content via painterly sophistication, renders similarly stylized figuration Yuskavage-lite.