Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood is the first up-to-date survey of the artist’s small-scale paintings. Known primarily for larger canvases, these intimate works offer a new window into Yuskavage’s transgressive paintings.
Based on the artist’s imagination, live models, and maquettes, among other things, the small paintings in this book demonstrate Yuskavage’s methodical exploration of how images come into existence, and where they come from. Some of the small works are studies for large paintings, while others revisit pre-existing images. Yet others are one-of-a-kind compositions only created on this intimate scale. As places for experimenting with color, form, and characters as well as a variety of formats—including stretched and unstretched linen, canvas boards, wood, and paper—these works, play a remarkably dynamic and role within her oeuvre. This catalogue presents the paintings to scale so readers can explore them as if seeing them in person.
Documenting the artist’s exhibition at David Zwirner in New York in 2018, this catalogue includes an essay by Jarrett Earnest illuminating Yuskavage’s early influences and exploring the constant, often surprising, themes that can be found throughout her oeuvre.
About the Author
American artist Lisa Yuskavage's (b. 1962) highly original approach to figurative painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre. Her simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. At times playful and harmonious, and at other times rueful and conflicted, these characters are cast within fantastical compositions in which realistic and abstract elements coexist and color determines meaning. While the artist's 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. Yet her oeuvre compellingly resists categorization, insisting instead on its own kind of emotional formalism in which characters and pictorial inventions assume equal importance.
Industry Reviews
"The most scandalous thing about which wasn't their sexual explicitness-much of the imagery was safely PG-13- but their style: a luminous, lowbrow Mannerism, rendered with such self-evident technical brilliance that the works' tackiness begins to feel like an affront."--Rachel Wetzler "Art in America"
"As usual, dark humor and acrid color are mitigated by luminosity and sensitive execution."--Margaret McCann "Painter's Table"
"By blending realism and fantasy, Yuskavage challenges conventional expectations surrounding figurative painting."--Sarah Cascone "Artnet News"
"Lisa Yuskavage's art continues to defy characterization."--Thomas Gebremedhin "Wall Street Journal"
"More than thirty years of underage popsies rendered in Jordan-almond pastels and smoldering shades of red, gold, and acid green were on parade in 'Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985-2018.'"--Zoe Lescaze "ARTFORUM"
"The wild art star of the 1990s, known for her candy-colored voluptuaries with distorted faces and poses, ups her game."--Jerry Saltz "Vulture"
"This wonderful, almost overpoweringly virtuosic retrospective of nearly ninety small paintings spans her career... Love it or hate it, the breadth, rigor, and all-in commitment of Yuskavge's vision is undeniable."--Johanna Fateman "The New Yorker"
