Lisa Yuskavage has long occupied a polarizing position in contemporary painting, her work dismissed at times as anti-feminist, crude, or even aggressively indifferent to the expectations of taste. Her hypersexualized figures—plucked from a space between Renaissance paintings, religious iconography, and pornography—provoke discomfort, their exaggerated forms neither easily objectified nor simply categorized. Too straight for queer art, too grotesque for pin-up, her paintings often seem to issue a challenge to the viewer: who the fuck are you looking at? In fact, one work from 2020 suggested exactly that: the title is The Fuck You Painting.
But in her latest exhibition of new paintings, up through April 12 at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, Yuskavage, once accused of radicalizing the female nude to the point of alienation, has now turned her lens inward, deploying one of art history’s most conventional, and yet intimately personal tropes—the artist in the studio. Her new works mine not the pages of Penthouse, but rather her own mythology, where past motifs resurface in new ways and figures return like ghosts.