Lisa Yuskavage

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent paintings by American artist Lisa Yuskavage, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This will be the artist’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first in Los Angeles in almost thirty years.

One of the most original and influential artists of the past three decades, Yuskavage creates works that affirm the singularity of the medium of painting while challenging conventional understandings of genres and viewership. At once exhibitionist and introspective, her rich cast of characters and their varied attributes are layered within compositions built of both representational and abstract elements in which color is the primary vehicle of meaning.

On view will be large and small-format paintings—each set within an imagined artist’s studio—that continue Yuskavage’s exploration of the processes and complexities of art making. Saturated in vibrant, jewellike pigments, the depicted studios become stages where characters from Yuskavage’s oeuvre are intertwined and where time moves backward and forward. With this latest group of works, Yuskavage deepens and expands these recursive and referential elements, mining her personal iconography of figures, artworks, and objects as well as colors, tonalities, and diffuse ambient qualities, which she seamlessly combines into resonant, multifaceted tableaux. Within these timeless spaces, artifacts and objects from the artist’s own art education and career coexist with imagined depictions of art making.