Installation view, Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985–2018, David Zwirner, New York, 2018
Lisa Yuskavage’s (b. 1962) bold, eccentric, and playful characters are frequently cast against theatrical backdrops in which realistic and abstract elements coexist. 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.
please get in touch.
Installation view, Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985–2018, David Zwirner, New York, 2018
“She made pictures about women looking at themselves, of women looking at other women. And all these images had the DNA of six centuries’ worth of paintings made by men for men of means that were about looking at women, that were designed to be looked at in well-appointed rooms like libraries and museum galleries.” —Helen Molesworth
“Over a career now spanning thirty-five years, the artist has produced paintings that are abundantly present—ebulliently colorful, unabashedly explicit, epic in ambition—and yet equally and determinedly elusive in their meaning. These values are held in taut balance in almost every work, making it next to impossible to look away and certainly impossible to arrive quickly (or ever) at an assured, stable interpretation.” —Christopher Bedford
Lisa Yuskavage, Thespian, 2020 (detail)
Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood is the first survey of the artist’s small-scale paintings. While Yuskavage is primarily known for larger canvases, these intimate works offer a window into her transgressive paintings and complex and influential oeuvre.
please get in touch.