February 10, 2020
Wilderness is the first exhibition to explore the role landscape plays in Lisa Yuskavage’s highly influential paintings. The artist’s characters—bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective—are frequently set in fantastical environments in which real and abstract elements coexist and vivid colors convey meaning. In Wilderness, the 2009 painting after which the show is titled, two female figures (and the legs of a third figure), are positioned in a powerful red, green, and yellow-hued landscape unfolding across two panels, with the potent color scheme extending over the women’s clothing and skin. While the terrain is vaguely naturalistic, it is also clearly permeated by unreal forces. As the museum’s press release observes: “Yuskavage explores the space of myth and fiction as it manifests in our surroundings, lending a sense of the romantic—and even the seductive—to the everyday.”
The exhibition will travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art from February 28, 2021–September 19, 2021.
A forthcoming catalogue will be published on the occasion of this exhibition, including essays by Christopher Bedford, Helen Molesworth, and Heidi Zuckerman, as well as a conversation between Yuskavage and Mary Weatherford. Recently published by David Zwirner Books, Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood, Small Paintings, 1985–2018 is the first survey of the artist’s small-scale paintings. The Brood, published in 2015 to accompany a major solo exhibition, explores more than two decades of her work.
On February 25, the artist will be in conversation with critic and curator Jarrett Earnest, who contributed a text to Babie Brood, at McNally Jackson in New York. They will discuss the dynamics of education for artists, their shared interest in psychoanalysis and how it relates to writing and painting, and the role of narrative within art, memory, and history.
Image: Lisa Yuskavage, Wilderness, 2009 (detail)