Lisa Yuskavage

This exhibition marks a significant development in Yuskavage’s practice while synthesizing the themes that have shaped her oeuvre since the beginning. Although many of the paintings and drawings appear to unfold within a studio setting, they are more accurately located in the mind of the artist, becoming imaginative gatherings where time warps and folds back on itself, collapsing spatial and temporal boundaries.

Although widely recognized as a figurative painter, Yuskavage has long engaged with the legacy of color field painting—an influence that becomes particularly evident in the present exhibition. In a new development in her practice, she introduces trompe-l’oeil devices to arrive at a comparable emphasis on abstraction, mobilizing illusion precisely to emphasize through contrast the inherent flatness of the works.

In this sense, mimesis becomes paradoxically more abstract than abstraction itself, recalling an early modernist moment before abstraction and figuration hardened into opposing categories—when a painted figure could function simultaneously as representation and as purely pictorial event.

While the numerous empty canvases that have populated Yuskavage’s imagined studio interiors over the past several years have seemed to suggest future paintings, their recurrence across this body of work has gradually revealed a deeper significance.

As an art student, Yuskavage’s color theory classes utilized Color-aid decks to create collage studies, and in these colored squares she recognized a connection to her formative education. A latent narrative of color pedagogy emerges, summoning the presence of Bauhaus figures Josef Albers and his teacher Johannes Itten.

This exhibition follows the acclaimed Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings—the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artist’s works on paper, which was on view at The Morgan Library & Museum, New York from June 2025 through January 2026.

Incorporating drawings from the early nineties to the present and including sketches and finished studies, the Morgan presentation featured a wide range of Yuskavage’s explorations with materials including work in graphite, pen, Conte, pastel, charcoal, distemper, monotype, gouache, watercolor, acrylic and ink on paper, charting the artist’s career-long inquiry into how process and material experimentation create entirely new ways to find images. 

The exhibition introduces a body of collages—a new medium for the artist—using a selection of green Color-aid paper as a ground. The slightly textured surface of the paper interacts with the mixed media of pastel, egg tempera, gouache, and pasted elements to produce subtle light effects that heighten the spatial illusion.

The collages move beyond the re-representation of works from Yuskavage’s oeuvre—some of which have been pasted onto the surfaces in perspective—to reenact the artistic techniques embedded within them. While they effectively disguise their constructed nature, the paintings, by contrast, simulate its appearance.

Small-scale paintings have been a constant and integral part of Yuskavage’s oeuvre since the mid-1980s. As places for exploring color, form, and characters, as well as a variety of supports, the small paintings play a remarkably dynamic and protean role for the artist, continuously inspiring new pictorial developments.

Across the exhibition, scale shifts continuously as characters and images appear in unexpected proportions. This dynamic is echoed within the exhibition itself, where viewers move from expansive canvases to smaller, intimate compositions in a recursive play of enlargement and reduction that produces a surreal, almost fractal form of world-building.

Yet above all, these are works that insist on being looked at. They signal a renewed embrace of pleasures historically associated with painting before the modernist project of demystification: color, illusion, sensuality, and imaginative invention. If much of the twentieth century sought to dismantle the magic of the medium, Yuskavage restores it—not nostalgically, but with full awareness of its constructed nature. 

By repeatedly returning to her own images rather than appropriating those of others, she demonstrates painting’s capacity to transform imagination into visible form, and the enduring, unapologetic joy and potential of the medium itself.