PRESENTATION:Lisa Yuskavage

Twenty years after her first exhibition with David Zwirner, Lisa Yuskavage is not looking back—she’s painting into the wormhole. This May, the artist returns to the gallery’s West 19th Street location for her tenth solo presentation, an exhibition that seamlessly synthesizes the key themes of her career while revealing a series of bold technical and conceptual developments. The body of work on view is both a reunion with familiar characters and a departure into new artistic terrain, cementing Yuskavage’s status as one of the most original painters of the past three decades.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

For all the physical space they occupy, the large-scale canvases and intimate works on paper in this exhibition are not really set in a room. As writer and curator Helen Molesworth observes, the works reveal “a complex history composed of personal iconography and a range of art-historical allusions—the artist as young girl, the older woman, the painter, the painted.” Each painting, she says, “functions like a wormhole, moving viewers forward and backward through time. Nothing is exactly what it seems; instead, the paintings sustain a state of constant vacillation.”

Indeed, Yuskavage collapses spatial and temporal boundaries, creating a space that exists primarily in the artist’s imagination. Her signature characters—at once exhibitionist and introspective, vulnerable and assertive—assume dual roles as subjects and objects, complicating the very act of looking. The viewer is never allowed to settle into a passive gaze; these figures look back, return the glance, and in doing so, expose the apparatus of viewership itself.

Deeply engaged with the legacy of color field painting, Yuskavage deploys color not merely as atmosphere but as a primary character. This exhibition marks a significant development in her practice: the introduction of trompe l’oeil devices to heighten the tension between illusion and flatness. By mobilizing illusion to expose the inherent flatness of the picture plane, Yuskavage achieves a paradox: mimesis becomes more abstract than abstraction itself. Her work recalls an early modernist moment before abstraction and figuration hardened into opposing categories—when a painted figure could function simultaneously as representation and as a purely pictorial event.

One of the most surprising turns in the exhibition is the introduction of collage, a wholly new medium for the artist. Using Color-aid paper as a ground, Yuskavage creates works that blend pastel, egg tempera, gouache, and pasted elements. The slightly textured surface of the paper interacts with these mixed media to produce subtle light effects that heighten spatial illusion. These collages are not simply re-representations of earlier works but reenactments of the artistic techniques embedded within them. They disguise their constructed nature while the paintings, by contrast, simulate its appearance.

This development connects directly to Yuskavage’s formative education. As an art student, she used Color-aid decks in color theory classes, and in those colored squares she recognized a connection to the Bauhaus pedagogy of Josef Albers and Johannes Itten. The exhibition thus becomes a latent narrative of color pedagogy, summoning the ghost of modernist education into the gallery.

Across the works, scale shifts continuously, with characters and images appearing in unexpected proportions. This dynamic is echoed in the exhibition’s installation, where viewers move from expansive canvases to smaller, intimate compositions in a recursive play of enlargement and reduction. The result is a surreal, almost fractal form of world-building. Ultimately, the works become both subjects and objects within an ongoing relational exchange—a pictorial universe that continually reflects back upon itself.

Yet for all their conceptual complexity, these are works that insist on being looked at. They embrace the pleasures historically associated with painting before the modernist project of demystification: color, illusion, sensuality, and imaginative invention. If much of the twentieth century sought to dismantle the magic of the medium, Yuskavage restores it—not nostalgically, but with full awareness of its constructed nature. By repeatedly returning to her own images rather than appropriating those of others, she demonstrates painting’s capacity to transform imagination into visible form, and the enduring, unapologetic joy of the medium itself.

Photo: Lisa Yuskavage, Endless Studio, 2024, Oil on linen,Triptych, Overall: 12 x 31 inches (30.5 x 78.7 cm), Signed, dated, and inscribed verso, © Lisa Yuskavage, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 14/5-26/6/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/