Lisa Yuskavage, who was born in Philadelphia in 1962 and lives today in New York, makes paintings that involve a cast of stylised and often eroticised, mostly female characters set within invented interiors and landscapes.
Lisa Yuskavage's Endless Studio (Portal) (2025) © Lisa Yuskavage, courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner
Deeply engaged with the history of art and representation, Yuskavage’s pictures explore centuries-old traditions and genres and play with them, along a sliding scale from homage to subversion, sometimes within the space of one canvas. Her figures can derive from everyday observation, draw from soft-porn magazines or a wealth of other pop-cultural sources, or quote from historic paintings.
Lisa Yuskavage's Night Classes in Color Theory, Lesson One: Green IV (2026) © Lisa Yuskavage, courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner
But set within enigmatic spaces, accompanied by a range of props and objects, and allied to Yuskavage’s intoxicating colour sense, they are encapsulated in a singular realm of imagination and unleashed into the peculiar communion between this artist and us—one which can be delightful and disquieting, often at once.
Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage, David Zwirner, New York, May 14—June 26, 2026 Courtesy David Zwirner
Yuskavage reflects on the “emotional formalism” at the heart of her work, her early visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and trip to Italy and their transformative effect on her work. She discusses the seismic effect of seeing a Giovanni Bellini painting in Venice, the ongoing influence of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés and her admiration for, among others, Agnes Martin, Philip Guston and Laura Owens. She talks about the poet Wallace Stevens’s impact on her work and her interest in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
• Lisa Yuskavage, David Zwirner, New York, until 26 June
This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture platform. Bloomberg Connects offers access to a vast range of international cultural organisations through a single click, with new guides being added regularly. They include several US museums in which Lisa Yuskavage has had solo exhibitions, from the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, to the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), St Louis. On the guide to CAM, you can hear extensive audio features on its current exhibitions. They include And I Saw New Heavens and a New Earth: The Partnership, Art and Activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, which explores the work and life of the extraordinary artists, life-partners and queer icons, from their association with the Surrealist avant garde in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, to their time on the island of Jersey after 1937, and their resistance efforts and arrests in the Second World War. You can also take a tour of the exhibition Andrea Carlson: Endless Sunshine with the artist herself, and hear about the exhibitions dedicated to Ayana Evans and Janie Stamm.
