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ARTIST LISA YUSKAVAGE on taking INSPIRATION from her own early PORTRAITS of WOMEN for a new BODY of WORK that's a collage-like MEDITATION on MEMORY, INVENTION, DESIRE, and BEAUTY

- LAIA GARCIA-FURTADO

Lisa Yuskavage, Painter Painting, Act I, 2026

If God once said, “Let there be light,” and if color is the expression of that light as seen through the human eye, then Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings deal in nothing less than the holy. In her Brooklyn studio, large canvases hang on the walls, each a portal into the magic moment of creation, all bathed in a prismatic glow. The once-controversial women who served as protagonists of her earlier paintings—fleshy, with big tits, round asses, and sometimes plump bellies and labia—are here, keeping her company as she works or sometimes snoozes in a corner. Others have come back as paintings within her new paintings, leaning in corners or hanging in the background, like Easter eggs for the real Yuskavage heads.

Playing with her own body of work in these new paintings, which are part of a solo exhibition opening at David Zwirner in New York on May 14, has required self-assurance. But Yuskavage is not just taking a stroll down memory lane to rest and smell the flowers. She works best from a particular kind of friction. In the ’90s, she broke onto the scene with sexually explicit portraits of women that mixed the so-called sexual liberation of the era with traditional painting techniques. Her work found fans almost as quickly as it found detractors, with some critics even going so far as to characterize it as misogynist or puerile, as if there was any way she was painting for the male gaze or anyone but herself.