Opening June 9
June 2023
David Zwirner is pleased to present its first exhibition with Lisa Yuskavage in Paris. This will be the artist’s eighth solo show with the gallery. One of the most original figurative artists of the past three decades, Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting just as they challenge conventional understandings of genres and viewership. At once exhibitionist and introspective, her varied characters are cast within layered compositions of realistic and abstract elements in which color determines meaning. While the artist’s painterly techniques evoke art-historical precedents, her motifs are often inspired by popular culture, creating an underlying dichotomy between high and low, and, by implication, sacred and profane, harmony and dissonance. For this exhibition, Yuskavage presents new large-scale paintings, each set within an artist’s studio. Saturated in deep, jewel-like pigments of red, green, and yellow, these works form part of Yuskavage’s ongoing exploration of the processes of art making and the question of what constitutes a model. The studios become stages where characters from throughout her oeuvre—including the artist herself—are intertwined, and where time moves backward and forward at once. As such, Yuskavage’s paintings create a dialogue between her own subjective experience as artist and model, and a tradition of studio portrayals by artists such as Gustave Courbet and Henry Matisse that are both uniquely personal and reflective of a specific moment in time. Yuskavage’s explicit subjects and her distinctive approach to color—which recalls an American tradition of color-field painting—invite further dialogues with the history of impressionist and post-impressionist art, imagining and reimagining the circumstances that shape painter and painted alike.