Lisa Yuskavage’s Fleshy Femmes Rock David Zwirner New York
“There’s a way in which a painting finds grace, a way that everything lands in place.”
Summary
- David Zwirner in Chelsea is currently presentin g a solo show by seminal American artist Lisa Yuskavage
- Across over two dozen new and recent artworks, the show highlights recurring themes within the artist’s oeuvre, while introducing her first-ever collages and trompe-l’oeil elements
New York Art Week is hitting its peak and David Zwirner’s is putting Lisa Yuskavage front and center in Chelsea. An eponymous exhibition, on through June 26, gathers over two dozen recent works by the seminal painter, tracing recurring themes within her practices, while charting new territory.
A pivotal force in contemporary art, Yuskavage is known for pushing the envelope of painting. Color itself serves as a living companion beside her once-controversial nude femmes, deconstructing and reconsidering ideas like viewership, divisions between subject and object, artifice and the gendered gaze.
The ongoing presentation marks a technical evolution for the artist, marking her first foray into collage. Pastel, tempera and gouache are sublimely layered over Color-aid paper, which make for striking spatial illusions, tempered with trompe-l’oeil devices, a subtle play on the legacy of color-field abstraction.
While works appear to be staged in a studio, they are “more accurately located in the mind of the artist,” per a Zwirner statement, “becoming imaginative gatherings where time warps and folds back on itself, collapsing spatial and temporal boundaries.”
Canvases depicted within the paintings appear elsewhere in the gallery. Between monumental compositions and scaled-back, intimate frames, Yuskavage’s world fractures and folds in on itself, beckoning viewers into a self-reflexive pictorial universe.
“There’s a way in which a painting finds grace, a way that everything lands in place,” the artist wrote in a recent essay for Harper’s Bazaar. “When you’re making art and you do not have a rule book and you’re flying by the seat of your pants…when they all come together, the word that comes to mind is grace. There’s this feeling of just elegance, of purpose, and that is beautiful.”
Lisa Yuskavage is now on view at David Zwirner in New York.
David Zwirner Chelsea
533 W 19th Street,
New York, NY 10011
