Lisa Yuskavage

For more than thirty years, Lisa Yuskavage (Philadelphia, 1962) has challenged conventional conceptions of the genre. His audacious, eccentric, exhibitionist and introspective characters assume the double role of subject and object, which complicates the position of the viewer. Sometimes playful and harmonious, and sometimes sad and conflicting, these characters are projected into fantastical compositions in which realistic and abstract elements coexist and color determines meaning. While the artist's painterly techniques evoke historical classicism, his motifs are often inspired by popular culture.

After studying at the Tyler School of Art, Lisa Yuskavage obtained her MFA (Master of Fine Arts) at the Yale School of Art in New Haven in 1986. From her first group exhibitions, she directly posed the question of gender (Little Men/ Little Women [“little men, little women”], New York, 1992; The Anti-Masculine, Los Angeles, 1992).

In 2015, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts presented Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, a major solo exhibition spanning twenty-five years of the artist's work. The exhibit then traveled to the St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016. A comprehensive, large-scale publication by Skira Rizzoli, published in conjunction with the exhibit, created in close collaboration with Yuskavage, includes texts from renowned art historians, curators and writers including Christopher Bedford, Suzanne Hudson, Catherine Lord and Siddhartha Mukherjee, plus an interview with the artist by Katy Siegel.

Yuskavage's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2000); Center for Contemporary Art, Geneva (2001); Museo Tamayo Contemporary Art, Mexico City (2006); and The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (organized as part of Dublin Contemporary 2011).

In 2020, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum co-hosted a solo presentation of the artist's work, Wilderness, focusing on how she has used landscape in her work since the early watercolors of the Tit Heaven series from the early 1990s. The exhibit first premiered at the Aspen Art Museum in 2020 and will travel to the Baltimore Museum of Art in the spring of 2021.