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Since her arrival on the art scene some twenty-five years ago, Lisa Yuskavage has made a name for herself with paintings that use classical techniques to depict unabashedly taboo subjects. Her creations—awash in radiant, hallucinatory colors and featuring hedonistic heroines unlike anything else in art today—are instantly identifiable. Her latest show, which opened last week at David Zwirner in New York, explores the idea of the incubus and succubus, and includes images of men—Dude Looks Like Jesus, for instance—a first for the artist. "I was thinking a lot about Dürer," she says. "There’s this obsession with a certain look, which has to do with a revolutionary kind of guy."

I met Yuskavage, who is fifty-two, at her spacious Brooklyn studio earlier this month, where our talk touched on a variety of subjects, including her process, her past, and her experimentation with Grindr, the gay dating app. We'd intended to take a trip to her favorite bookstore, Ursus Books, afterward, but we stayed at her studio instead, conversing as pale yellow light crept along the floor.

When critics discuss your work, they talk a lot about gaze—whether the figures depicted are inviting us to look or whether we're intruding upon something private.
It's interesting because in order to make some of these paintings of men, I did something a few years ago—I didn't realize why I was doing it at the time. I joined Grindr. I had a Grindr persona. You didn't think I was going to say that today, did you?

Do you remember your username?
I don't remember, but I eventually took it down when I almost hooked up with someone. I met someone by accident. My husband has a very nice body, and I took a picture of his torso. He had pants on. I didn't want to be that vulgar, because I didn't want to present myself as being just interested in sex.

So I was at Le Pain Quotidien on Bleecker Street having my stupid vegan soup. I was looking at Grindr and imagining the Dionysian possibilities of life. It seemed like the air was full of sex. Not just sex, but hopefulness. Then I see that there's someone who, whatever you call it, poked me or tapped me. He was ten feet away. I was like looking around and then I saw someone looking around. He was looking for me, and he couldn't find me because I didn't exist!

Do you still have the app?
I immediately deleted it. I realized it was a strange thing to be doing and I cold-turkeyed it. I suppose when you asked about gaze, something I've been working a lot with is using my own fascination with what turns people on. Which is why Grindr was so interesting to me. I had no idea why I had done it. But I think the thing is—in a way, everything is enchanted, if you can just let it be. I was doing that because I was enchanted—to make the work that I'm making now. These are a series of paintings about the incubus and succubus.

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The Paris Review, artist interview by Thomas Gebremedhin