Lisa Yuskavage

Lisa Yuskavage (born 1962) is an American artist who lives and works in New York City.

She is known for her figure paintings that challenge conventional understandings of the genre.

While her painterly techniques evoke art historical precedents, her motifs are often inspired by popular culture, creating an underlying dichotomy between high and low and, by implication, sacred and profane, harmony and dissonance.

Yuskavage was born in 1962 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She attended the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and studied abroad during her third year through the Tyler School of Art’s program in Rome, before obtaining her BFA in 1984.

Yuskavage received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1986.

Since the early 1990s, Yuskavage has been associated with a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting.

Of the artist’s paintings, critic Roberta Smith has written: "The combination of mixed Subliminal messages, deliciously artificial color and forthright sexuality is characteristic of Ms. Yuskavage's work, as is the journey from high to low to lower culture within a relatively seamless whole."

Yuskavage’s oeuvre is characterized by her ongoing engagement with the history of painting, and in particular the genre of the nude.

Her paintings also encompass landscape and still life genres, with all three often appear within a single work.

Yuskavage’s use of color is imbedded in Renaissance techniques as well as Color Field painting, and she cites diverse inspirations, including Italian painter Giovanni Bellini, Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, and French painter Edgar Degas.

Theoretically, her paintings are associated with psychologically driven theories of viewing, such as that of the gaze.

However, the complexities inherent in her paintings deny singular interpretation; as curator and critic Christian Viveros-Fauné explains: "Yuskavage’s oeuvre ... succeeds exactly to the degree that it refuses to be pinned down to any one of its many conflicted meanings. 'I only load the gun', [Yuskavage] has been known to say to those who insist on viewing a painting as an explanation."

She had a New York exhibit sell out before it opened, and one of her paintings sold at auction for more than $1 million.

Yuskavage's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2000); Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2001); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2006); and The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (organized as part of Dublin Contemporary 2011).

In September 2015, Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood opened at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

This major solo exhibition presented the artist’s work spanning 25 years.

Additionally, Yuskavage is featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new online series, The Artist Project, launched in March 2015, in which she discusses Édouard Vuillard’s The Green Interior (1891).

In Tamara Jenkins' 2018 film Private Life, main characters Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) claim to be good friends with Yuskavage, whose artwork, gifted to them as a wedding present, hangs in their living room.

Yuskavage has been the recipient of honors and awards that include the Aspen Award for Art (2019); Temple University Gallery of Success Award (2005); the Founder's Day Certificate of Honor, Tyler School of the Arts, Philadelphia (2000); the Tiffany Foundation Grant (1996); and the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (1994).

In 2020, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum co-organized a solo presentation of the artist's work, Wilderness, focusing on the ways she has used landscape in her work since the earliest watercolor Tit Heaven series from the 1990s.

The exhibition was first shown at the Aspen Art Museum in 2020 and travelled to the Baltimore Museum of Art in spring 2021.

Yuskavage's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Yuskavage's work Half-Family was featured in Season 2, Episode 4 ("Lynch Pin") of the Emmy-nominated Showtime series, The L Word.

Her work is also mentioned in the novel China Rich Girlfriend of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy by Kevin Kwan.