Lisa Yuskavage’s Mirror Image

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Lisa Yuskavage has never been interested in making anyone comfortable — and her new solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, opening May 14, is proof she's not about to start. The show marks a formally ambitious pivot: paintings that fold her own archive back into itself, embedding older works as trompe l'oeil collages inside new canvases, layering studio self-portraits with Color-aid paper swatches and Polaroid studies, and letting the past and present exist simultaneously on a single surface. "The future is happening at the same time as the past," she says, "and that's what paintings can do."

According to Harper's Bazaar, the shift began accidentally. While working on one of her signature chromatic fields, Yuskavage noticed a bold yellow matte square left uncovered — and recognized it as Color-aid paper, the velvety swatch material used to teach Josef Albers's color theory. That detail became a catalyst. She started incorporating actual Color-aid paper, then printed and shrunk her own earlier paintings to use as collage material, then replaced the collage with trompe l'oeil illusions entirely. Old figures began reappearing inside new compositions. New ideas sprang from other new ideas. The body of work wasn't just referencing itself — it was metabolizing itself.

The Women Were Always the Point

The fleshy, sexually explicit women who made Yuskavage controversial in the '90s — and who attracted accusations of misogyny from critics who apparently couldn't fathom a woman painting from her own experience — are still here. She points to Rorschach Blot, a figure squatting with a bald vagina as exclamation point, puffy bread-loaf feet, open mouth: "like the Venus of Willendorf mixed with The Scream for the third-wave feminist," as one observer put it. Yuskavage doesn't flinch. She was after honesty — about the comedy and primalism of inhabiting a female body — and she maintains that honesty is its own form of beauty. "It's not my job to make people comfortable," she says. "I want to push them out of their comfort zone."

The new work is also deeply personal in a way that feels less like nostalgia and more like excavation. Painter Painting, Act I reconstructs a self-portrait from August 1984 — a determined young woman in short-shorts at her childhood homework desk, surrounded by trompe l'oeil Polaroids that would become source material for her Bad Habits paintings a full decade later. She's essentially painting backward through time to understand how she became herself. The oval motifs throughout the show, she notes, feel like mirrors — specifically the kind a young girl decorates with dream images so she can look at herself while imagining someone else.

At a moment when the art world tends to reward artists for consistency, Yuskavage is doing something harder: letting the work tell her what it needs to become, even when that feels uncomfortable. "It's always fun to be uncomfortable," she says. "Especially when you're a wizened older artist." She means it as a joke, but it's also a quiet flex — forty years in, and she's still slipping and sliding around, still discovering what works, still ungovernable.

The most radical thing about Yuskavage has always been her refusal to be satisfied with what she's already proven she can do.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.