It was the first Lisa Yuskavage exhibition in Los Angeles in thirty years, or so the Zwirner press release tells us. Some of us were there though, it was actually 29 years ago at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica, but okay, it’s been a while.
Almost three decades later the artist is still doing two things that force us to pay attention. First, she is still using garish color with aplomb as effectively as any painter maybe ever. The only downside must be how many terrible colorists she inspires to maintain their Dunning-Kruger manners with her domestication of the fluorescent. Or perhaps that just keeps so many mediocre artists in the realm of the terrible where they belong while she floats way above, the price on her materials stabilized by consistent demand from a market she established.
Her second and more notorious maintenance is to out-debase any imaginable debasement of the female form ahead of said debasement. She has managed to shock, from then to now and in between, without ever getting close to titillation. The essentialism of her oeuvre is the pictorial assertion that no man could casually care less about the undraped female form as she presents it. She is the antithesis of Sally Mann – there are no hidden fetishists among her admirers.
There is no title to the show at Zwirner besides her name but there is a theme of the artist’s studio as conceptual set piece in her new work here. It is a surreal place even after one’s expectations of those familiar firecracker colors and bulbously imbalanced bodies is met. There are allusions to art history, the Velasquez Las Meninas masterpiece came to my mind and a few other art nerd moments arose. The artist’s studio in the Yuskavage universe is a surreal melding of these historical allusions with this artist’s trademark un-trademarkable nudes. There are an infinite number of paintings within paintings and subjects that are privileged here then stacked amidst a clutter of canvasses over there. I’ve been to many artist studios, she nails it. The thing the artist invests their infinite spirit in today is piled up near the sink a few months later.
The decidedly unerotic, unfetishized nudes clamor about with a labcoat-frocked artist here and a palette-holding pixie with lopsided boobs there. The absence of anything on which the perma-maligned “male gaze” can settle remains the exhibit’s ever present consistency, like a dry cough that won’t go away as the doctor insists not to worry. My wife loved it while I was looking for maybe just a little more meat on the bone. After forty minutes of going between the tiny paintings and the oversized ones I realized there was plenty of meat here, just no bone.
The elegant compositions establish rigorous painting here and the weird addenda (is her occasional rendering of random peacocks in the studios a stand in for, well, let’s just call them non female humans at this point, that cannot be a stretch can it?) pulls the work away from just being a game of self-infatuated art history trivia. At times it seemed that the only ordinary thing was the glowing intense colors advertising a raw holiness to the spirit of the studio experience which documentary photographs could never capture. Lisa Yuskavage’s greatest accomplishment is how brutally UN-slick her painting here is. It was never more clear that a Yuskavage is savage painting for savage women, but most certainly not for savages.
The show ran thru April 12, 2025.
