Thirty years ago, the painter Lisa Yuskavage received what most people would consider to be the worst review of her life. Her husband couldn’t figure out why she was so delighted.
In Artforum, the critic Lane Relyea described Yuskavage’s paintings of perky-breasted, button-nosed women as “Hello Sex Kitties” and “visual stink bombs”. As soon as she read the brutal pan of her first Los Angeles solo show, “I knew I had arrived,” Yuskavage tells me over cinnamon-dusted coffee in her giant studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. “The bat had connected to the ball in a big way.” She jokes that the review belonged in a folder with all the other venomous, but not inaccurate, responses to her work. She’d like to label it: “You Say That Like It’s a Bad Thing.”
Yuskavage — now aged 62 — has been courting disapproval for decades with her deeply saturated, often discomfiting portraits of nude white women. When she started out, figurative painting was out of fashion. Today, it is contemporary art’s most popular genre — and Yuskavage is on top of the art world. Her largest paintings cost more than $2mn. She’s represented by the mega-gallery David Zwirner, which opens a solo exhibition of her work at its Los Angeles flagship this month to coincide with Frieze LA. In June, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York will present the first comprehensive survey of her drawings.