Lisa Yuskavage: Rendez-vous

In the newest episode of PROGRAM, Yuskavage joins host Helen Molesworth for a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in her hometown, following a discussion in her New York studio.

“When I come to my studio, I always tell myself anything is possible. Remember that. Everything and anything is possible. This is part of your job description: to be open to the changes and the possibility of change.… Maybe that’s why I started painting studios.”

—Lisa Yuskavage in conversation with Helen Molesworth

Lisa Yuskavage in her studio, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

For this exhibition, Yuskavage presents new large-scale paintings, each set within an imagined artist’s studio. These works establish a dialogue between personal iconography and a tradition of studio portrayals by artists as varied as Gustave Courbet, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and more contemporary figures like Philip Guston and Bruce Nauman. Yuskavage’s frequently ignoble and distinctively American subjects contrast with her original approach to color and light, inviting connections with earlier painterly traditions, such as color field painting, impressionism, and postimpressionism.

Lisa Yuskavage

The Artist's Studio, 2022

Oil and charcoal on linen

86 x 120 inches (218.4 x 304.8 cm)

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“Reproduction does not do justice to these paintings. You must view them in person to perceive the refined intimations in their ostensibly clownish style. The subtleties register slowly, building recognitions that, among other things, open royal roads to antecedents in the Old Masters.”

—Peter Schjeldahl, critic

Gustave Courbet, The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855 (detail). Collection of Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911 (detail). Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Georges Braque, The Studio (Vase before a Window), 1939 (detail). Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1993, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Philip Guston, In The Studio, 1975 (detail). Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Artist’s Studio is a kaleidoscopic composition featuring depictions of Yuskavage’s artworks within a barn-like studio. An urchin-like artist in front of a green, luminous painting-within-the-painting is a character from one of Yuskavage’s earliest works, The Ones That Don’t Want To: Bad Baby. Her presence in the foreground conflates different realms and moments in time, while also complicating the idea of self-portraiture, a genre Yuskavage has not engaged with fully until now.

Lisa Yuskavage, The Artist's Studio, 2022 (detail)

The furniture, fence, ladders, and still-life arrangements dispersed within the studio add their own symbolism, as does the presence of Yuskavage herself, posing in the background as a model. Together, these layered references recall the often-playful tradition of artists examining their own presence as creators within a work of art.

Lisa Yuskavage, The Artist's Studio, 2022 (detail)

Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage: Rendez-vous, David Zwirner, Paris. Explore all works on view.

“The logical question, then, is if the paintings in the first room of the exhibition depict artists’ studios or not. They undeniably form a series of self-portraits, portraits in color and of color, whose many and varied pictorial languages are like many temporal and narrative hints scattered on the canvases.”

—Julia Marchand, curator, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, “This is not a studio, this is a studio!,” 2023

Lisa Yuskavage

Golden Studio, 2023

Oil and charcoal on linen

86 x 120 inches (218.4 x 304.8 cm)

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The idea of the studio as a proscenium is particularly apparent in Golden Studio. Like an abstract pattern, the arrangement on the wall depicts selected works by Yuskavage. A large, luminous mirror or painting, propped up to the right, appears like a window interrupting the golden space. Depicting the artist as a young woman, it references Yuskavage’s 1983 painting Self Portrait, one of her only two designated self-portraits before this exhibition, and circuitously places the model in the studio as the object of her gaze.

Lisa Yuskavage, Golden Studio, 2023 (detail)

Used prominently by painters such as Velázquez and van Eyck to symbolize the world outside of the illusory work of art, the mirror here offers a symbolic contrast to the many duplicated artworks in the multidimensional composition, as if emphasizing their hyperreality.

Lisa Yuskavage, Golden Studio, 2023 (detail)

Lisa Yuskavage’s studio, 2020. Photo by the artist

“[The paintings are] executed with such tender love and care and so intelligently keyed to the history of Western painting. The work, then and now, fuses the essence of painting—what it is to look at a painting—with the lived reality of being looked at as a girl. The artist wanted the viewer to be made as uncomfortable as the figures represented seemed to be.”

—Jarrett Earnest, writer and curator

Lisa Yuskavage

Rendez-vous (boschmademedoit), 2023

Oil on linen

65 x 62 inches (165.1 x 157.5 cm)

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In Rendez-vous (boschmademedoit), a play appears to be taking place on a stage or tilted tabletop. The major elements comprise a cropped rendition of Yuskavage’s painting Bonfire—now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York—and a pair of models posing as figures from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490–1500 (detail). Collection of Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Lisa Yuskavage, Bonfire, 2013–2015 (detail). Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Lisa Yuskavage, Rendez-vous (boschmademedoit), 2023 (detail)

The Dionysian desire and virtuous restraint in the Dutch painter’s work are paralleled in the duality that exists in Yuskavage’s depicted studio setting, where an arrangement of a plank, sledgehammer, cables, beads, and other objects crowd the foreground as props for potential violence.

Lisa Yuskavage

Big Flesh Studio, 2022

Oil on linen

86 x 120 inches (218.4 x 304.8 cm)

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In Big Flesh Studio, Yuskavage depicts herself facing her work in progress, Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. About to apply the most important final touches, she has turned her back to two models in the foreground, but her own view is partially obstructed by a yellow painting.

Lisa Yuskavage, Big Flesh Studio, 2022 (detail)

Seamlessly integrating older, newer, and unrealized works and recombining them with real and imaginary characters and settings, the paradoxical studio setting emerges like a theater of the imagination, highlighting the unique ability of a painting to compress time and space.

Lisa Yuskavage in her studio, 2020. Photo by Jason Schmidt

Lisa Yuskavage

Artist on Model Stand, 2022

Oil on linen

84 x 72 inches (213.4 x 182.9 cm)

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“This isn’t a story about an artist learning to draw, or excavating the real. Rather, it is a story about an artist working, and working to figure out what she is doing, and then doing it on purpose.… In her own early work Yuskavage used a female figure to embody the painting as something to be looked at. But the women alone in interior spaces could also be seen to indicate an act of aesthetic attention, even meditation. Perhaps because Yuskavage is a female artist, for her the solitary figures also represent her experience alone in the studio.”

—Katy Siegel, research director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage: Rendez-vous, David Zwirner, Paris. Explore all works on view.

Act Two: Lola and Bad Baby is a small-scale composition that relates to Yuskavage's large-format work The Artist's Studio, also on view in Paris. While some of the small-format works in the show are studies or sources of inspiration for the larger works, others were made later, revisiting the larger compositions.

Lisa Yuskavage

Act Two: Lola and Bad Baby, 2022

Oil on linen

15 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches (40 x 45.1 cm)

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In 2018, David Zwirner presented an extensive survey of Yuskavage’s small-scale paintings. A constant and integral part of Yuskavage’s overall practice, the small paintings play a remarkably dynamic role, as the artist has consistently employed this format to explore a wide variety of media, techniques, sources, and purposes.

Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985–2018, David Zwirner, New York, 2018

“Painting historically has been understood as a platform for wild invention and misbehavior, an anarchy of the imagination, both of the world and of something other. And feminist artists from the 1970s on have posited the female body as a site to be manipulated for the purposes of making pressing and often daring social proposals. What distinguishes Yuskavage is her willingness to merge the lush, high-craft refinement of oil painting with a gregarious vocabulary of female transgression and empowerment.”

—Christopher Bedford, director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Lisa Yuskavage

Little Golden Studio, 2023

Oil on linen

11 1/8 x 14 inches (28.3 x 35.6 cm)

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As places for experimenting with color, form, and characters, the small-scale works—another example being Little Golden Studio, which refers to the larger Golden Studio in the main gallery—continuously inspire new pictorial developments.

Lisa Yuskavage

Tank Top Tondo, 2023

Oil on linen

Diameter: 10 3/4 inches (27.3 cm)

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“Moving between the triad of the female body, the gaze and the female soul, Ms. Yuskavage has cultivated a terrain of rich and disturbing ambiguities, making works that can be both tender and astoundingly harsh. She has been aided in this endeavor by her devotion to a second triad, that of light, color and flesh as they can be conveyed by the plasticity of oil paint.”

—Roberta Smith, chief critic, The New York Times

Lisa Yuskavage, Tank Top Tondo, 2023 (detail)

Installation view, Lisa Yuskavage: Rendez-vous, David Zwirner, Paris. Explore all works on view.

Podcast: Lisa Yuskavage on Matisse’s The Red Studio

In this special episode produced and hosted by Yuskavage, six artists—Joe Bradley, Carroll Dunham, Rashid Johnson, David Reed, Sarah Sze, and Charline von Heyl—give Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, their insights on Matisse’s Red Studio and the elusive nature of creativity.

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