Lisa Yuskavage’s exhibition Wilderness has just closed at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The display, in four rooms, was epic, with large paintings that traded in apocalyptic fantasy, exquisite and exciting brushwork, fulsome bodies, and the artist’s customarily astonishing color. I went with my wife and fifteen-year-old son, and afterwards we ambled into the museum’s fabled Cone Collection where I showed him Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) (1907). His response was immediate and clear: “I can’t believe people think this is better than Lisa’s paintings.”
Matisse, among other Old Masters, gets the full Yuskavage treatment in her show of 14 new paintings at Zwirner, displayed in two rooms. The first features some small canvases: a prismatic set of six oils on the entry wall and two near-grisaille works on the west wall including The Fuck You Painting (2020), a bust-length woman with a fiery expression flipping the world the double bird. On the adjacent wall is the large, vividly brushed Scissor Sisters (2020), with three partially clad confrontational women (one with a gun) in an amalgamation of Charlie’s Angels, a similarly titled picture of a duo (2019), and Yuskavage’s hippie pictures dating back to 2013. The trio bears a buccaneerish, Daisy Duke swagger, but will brook no bullshit. On the final wall is Bonfire Tondo (2021), a rare format for the artist but containing a familiar image: a woman behind an immense fire about to bring a long weapon down on an unimaged victim. The gorgeous blue sky behind the molten foreground glow belies the ferocity of the motif.