A few years ago in the NY Times, Ken Johnson wrote that Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings were sly, soft-porn fantasies of pneumatic women in hazes of auto-erotic reverie.
“Some will say that she is subversively toying with the male gaze; others, noting the melting light in her pictures, that she is mainly a fine painter. Still others might read her overheated style as a spoof of a certain Old World painterly kitsch. Underlying all that is the daring exploration — at once carnal, mystical and funny — of forbidden zones of feminine experience and desire. It all makes an exhilarating, mysteriously ambiguous visual poetry.”
Is it completely uncool to say I hate these paintings? I know they’re really well painted, but…
Art Observed covers the recent opening of Lisa Yuskavage�s second solo show with David Zwirner. Check out the James Kalm Report here.
“Lisa Yuskavage,” David Zwirner, New York, NY. through March 28.
thank you for saying this. I do not hate them, but unanimity is disconcerting; makes me wonder if someone is biting their tongue.
Hi Sharon, I love the way Robert Storr categorized Yuskavage’s works when he put her in his Site Santa Fe show in 2004. It was a show focused on the grotesque and it fits — what she’s painting is really grotesques. I have never liked Yuskavage’s paintings — and re technique, really, if you put a lot of yellow on any painting it will look luminous — but I find that if I consider them coming out of a tradition focused on the extreme weird outer edges of culture I can at least deal. (Goya, Grosz, Gober, Currin, Saul…) The images on Art Observed show Yuskavage moving from soft to hard porn. I guess it was inevitable.
I hate them.