The Brooklyn Rail

Lisa Yuskavage has long occupied a polarizing position in contemporary painting, her work dismissed at times as anti-feminist, crude, or even aggressively indifferent to the expectations of taste. Her hypersexualized figures—plucked from a space between Renaissance paintings, religious iconography, and pornography—provoke discomfort, their exaggerated forms neither easily objectified nor simply categorized. Too straight for queer art, too grotesque for pin-up, her paintings often seem to issue a challenge to the viewer: who the fuck are you looking at? In fact, one work from 2020 suggested exactly that: the title is The Fuck You Painting.

But in her latest exhibition of new paintings, up through April 12 at David Zwirner in Los Angeles, Yuskavage, once accused of radicalizing the female nude to the point of alienation, has now turned her lens inward, deploying one of art history’s most conventional, and yet intimately personal tropes—the artist in the studio. Her new works mine not the pages of Penthouse, but rather her own mythology, where past motifs resurface in new ways and figures return like ghosts.

This self-referential turn doesn’t seem to be just about autobiography; rather, Yuskavage embeds herself within the world of her own making, treating her presence as another element in the ongoing evolution of her painterly universe. In many of the works, Yuskavage portrays herself from behind, her red hair, glasses, and lab coat serving as unmistakable markers of the artist at work. In Endless Studio (2024), Yuskavage is depicted before a large canvas, her act of painting unfolding within a scene where past works and characters re-emerge and intermingle. In the foreground, a nude woman wearing beaded underwear recalls The Good (1995), while beside her, the canvas of the work Oh (1995) leans against spare wooden frames. The work on the easel depicts a bonfire, a nod to the artist’s 2013–15 painting Bonfire, reinforcing the sense that Yuskavage’s studio is a site of perpetual dialogue, where older images are revisited, reworked, and introduced to new narratives. Although her signature cast of characters typically inhabits its own distinct worlds, here, she assigns them fluid roles—some exist as figures in the studio, others appear as subjects within paintings inside the painting, while others still echo past iterations, blurring the line between memory and reinvention.

In earlier bodies of work, Yuskavage was primarily driven by color theory, using high-chroma hues and strategic color juxtapositions to heighten psychological tension and create an almost hallucinatory luminosity. But this exhibition sees her shifting focus towards scale, using it to disorient and destabilize. In several paintings, towering figures loom over the artist at work as if painted onto massive canvases that diminish her presence. In Painter Painting (2024), she stands in her pink and purple studio before a monumental grisaille of one of her “Bad Habits” characters, a series of sculptural maquettes she created in the late nineties. In another work, Notebook (Loved) (2024), two models stand before a massive sheet of lined paper, its scale exaggerated beyond human proportions, transforming it into an uncanny, surreal backdrop. This play with scale introduces a striking reversal: the artist, once in total command of her universe, now appears engulfed by it. The towering figures in the background of Painter Painting are both subjects and silent witnesses, asserting a presence that verges on the overwhelming. Rather than positioning herself as sole creator, Yuskavage fractures her presence, suggesting a more porous relationship between artist and artwork. In doing so, she turns the act of seeing inward, no longer an omnipotent spectator, but one who is subsumed by the very world she has painted.

By engulfing herself within her own oeuvre, is Yuskavage asserting control, or relinquishing it? The towering figures, the characters in her studio, all shift the dynamic and, in a way, work to reduce the artist to a diminutive observer within her own domain. No longer the omnipotent maker, she appears as a spectator alongside we spectators outside the canvas, caught in a recursive space where past and present collapse into one another. This self-insertion offers a deeper understanding of her work while also, perversely, unsettling the act of seeing itself, turning the artist into just another figure in the spectacle she created.

In any case, this exhibition feels best suited for those already immersed in Yuskavage’s world, like searching for hidden clues or listening to a familiar song, where each note lands differently with time. Her monochromes, “Bad Babies,” “Bad Habits,” pastoral landscapes, exaggerated curves, and playful lingerie all reappear—not as mere echoes of the past, but as integral parts of the ever-expanding universe she has built and now inhabits.