Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness

Yuskavage creates finely detailed landscapes that blur the line between the fantastical and the familiar, melding abstraction with realism to depict self-contained worlds. These outdoor scenes defy conventions of landscape painting with surreal color palettes of lush greens and delicate pinks, cast in a gauzy light quality that highlights the almost magical nature of her paintings. -- James Cox * Midwest Book Review *
Having developed a strong visual identity linked to exploring female anatomy, Yuskavage’s paintings leave little room for feelings of indifference. They are challenging and uncomfortably explicit, yet there is a mysterious aura that captures the viewer. Voluptuous female figures with impossibly huge breasts, perfect peach skin and child-like complexion play around immersed in idyllic landscapes. -- Augustina Mistretta * Aspen Daily News *
...[P]ay attention to what Yuskavage has been doing in the background. There, you’ll find groundbreaking landscapes ranging from the romantic to the apocalyptic. It’s a journey from Eden to hell and back. -- Andrew Travers * Aspen Times *
Yuskavage, a masterful colorist, makes lush, luminous, intentionally — and delightfully — gauche paintings that unsettle facile notions of misogyny, femininity and the female gaze. -- Julia Felsenthal * New York Times: Style *
Lisa Yuskavage is perhaps best known for her paintings of voluptuous sexualized female figures in romantic, dramatically lit environments [...] Yuskavage ascribes an otherworldly transcendence to her portraits, eschewing pictorial conventions to lend a sense of seductivity to the everyday. -- Ryan Waddoups * Surface *
[W]idely recognized for her distinct use of color and form to subvert pictorial depictions, establishing a world of her own with its own myths and fantastical conventions [...] the boundary-pushing painter...introduc[ed] her sexualized female subjects across pictorial paintings. -- Keith Estiler * Hypebeast *
For over three decades, Yuskavage’s magical, provocative paintings of nude women (and to a lesser extent, men) have raised the eyebrows of the more conservative ilk for their perceived carnality [...] Make no mistake—Yuskavage isn’t trying to portray these women as particularly sexual, she’s simply allowing the women in her paintings to just “be”. -- Ann Binlot * Document Journal *