Women's Lifestyle May 12, 2026 0 Comments

Unlocking the Hidden Power Behind Lisa Yuskavage’s Mirror Image—You Won’t Believe What Lies Beneath the Surface!

Ever wonder what happens when an artist stares deep into her own creative soul and decides to shake things up—big time? Lisa Yuskavage isn’t just painting pictures; she’s diving headfirst into a wild dance with her past work, flipping the script in ways that make you squint, chuckle, and think all at once. From those boldly unapologetic figures that stirred controversy in the ’90s to her latest self-referential masterpieces, Yuskavage’s Brooklyn studio has turned into a colorful battleground of memory, identity, and raw, unfiltered creation. It’s like watching a boss woman on the frontline, challenging herself and the world—collaging, recollecting, reinventing—because settling? Not on her watch. This isn’t your typical stroll down memory lane; it’s an intense, gritty grind to paint something truly unseen, to go beyond comfort zones and bring a fresh voice into the game. So, if you think art’s just about pretty pictures, hold that thought—because Lisa’s about to wreck that idea and rebuild it in a blaze of prismatic glory. Ready to step inside the studio? LEARN MORE

7 min read

Artwork depicting a woman painting in an interior setting

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.

Yuskavage continued to expand on her work, taking her figures out of the infinite color fields of her earliest pieces and placing them in nature or having them interact with one another or with men until she finally brought them to where it all started: her own studio. Now, though, the scoffer might be the artist herself. “Oh my God, I’m doing collages,” she says of this multilayered, self-referential shift. “It’s not me. It’s like being a swinger all of a sudden. I’m going to need new clothes and new friends.”

Except it was the work itself that was telling her what it needed to become. As Yuskavage tells it, she was painting one of her vast color fields on a canvas when a bold yellow matte square that remained uncovered kept catching her eye. “What is that?” she wondered. She decided that it was Color-aid paper, the velvety swatches art and design students use to learn Josef Albers’s theory of color. So she decided to try to incorporate the actual Color-aid paper into the pieces, which now also included smaller works on paper that sometimes involved pastels. From there, she continued to experiment. Why not shrink and print out her own work and use it as more collage material? Why not replace the collage with trompe l’oeil techniques? She started borrowing from herself in real time; old paintings began to appear in new paintings, and new paintings emerged from ideas in other new paintings. The snake was not just eating itself but constantly giving birth.

Below, Yuskavage speaks about these new works, uncertainty as a driver of creativity, and her own idea of beauty.

There’s a way in which a painting finds grace, a way that everything lands in place. When you’re making art and you do not have a rule book and you’re flying by the seat of your pants…when they all come together, the word that comes to mind is grace. There’s this feeling of just elegance, of purpose, and that is beautiful.

Vulgarity can be truthful in some cases. I think a lot of women can really relate to the way in which I was trading in some of those aspects in some of my earlier work. When you find yourself in a female body, there can be a kind of awkwardness, and sometimes it goes further. Everything that happens to your body is in some ways comic if you really let it be. I was including it because I was trying to be honest and true to my experience, but I was also thinking about historical moments.

“The biggest RESPONSIBILITY I think you have as a PAINTER is to paint SOMETHING that hasn’t ALREADY been SEEN.”

One of the more “vulgar” paintings I ever made was called Rorschach Blot, with this giant figure in a squat with a bald vagina that’s an exclamation point. She’s got this big belly and feet that are really puffy—like loaves of bread, almost, in the shoes—and her mouth is open, a round thing waiting to be filled. Someone said it was like the Venus of Willendorf mixed with The Scream for the third-wave feminist. And it is like a Venus of Willendorf in a certain way. This image is really primal, and in some ways, being female, you can be very much in touch with being primal, like when you have a baby. So in that period of work in the ’90s, I was really trying to get in touch with that. The biggest responsibility I think you have as a painter is to paint something that hasn’t already been seen. I wanted to depict things that I felt that I could understand and know, and I recognized that in the particular experience of my life in this female vessel. I was really trying to touch the edges of things, but I think that those things are in their own ways beautiful. I think honesty is beautiful.

I think art is really at its most graceful and beautiful when you give viewers the feeling that they’re not alone in this world, that there’s somebody else who gets it. Everyone has had that moment where they see something in a film and they’re like, “Wow, that’s such a window into something I feel like I know.” It’s not my job to make people comfortable. I want to push them out of their comfort zone to some degree and not satisfy them in the way they think they want to be satisfied. I’ve had this experience where many people have said, “Oh, I didn’t get your work, and then when I did get your work, I couldn’t get enough of it.” I think that’s a really nice feeling, to be affecting people like that.

Triptych artwork depicting a creative space with multiple figures and various artistic elements.

Lisa Yuskavage, Endless Studio with Peacock and Full Moon, 2025

I’m in my studio, and I have this ambition to change the game in a way. I have fun doing it, and I think I sometimes pull it off. [In these works] my guiding light was my eccentric inner awareness. I enjoyed finding a new thing [for this new series of paintings], and I’m still discovering what works. It is thrilling because I am slipping and sliding around, trying things out. It’s always fun to be uncomfortable. There is beauty in being uncomfortable, especially when you’re a wizened “older artist.” Apparently I’m an “older artist,” even though I am very immature. It takes this long to become a big enough spirit to be able to handle all the things that I’ve wanted to handle. When I was younger, I couldn’t have handled the kind of work that I am making now.

There are ovals inside of the paintings, and it occurred to me to take them out of the paintings and into reality, so I’m working from fantasy to reality rather than reality to fantasy. I painted this image of the first self-portrait I ever made as an art student. I inserted it it into a painting from a few years ago called Golden Studio. These images of [figures] attempting to be an artist are part of the material and also my archival work, bringing these images to the foreground and being able to put them together. It’s the way the mind and memory work. These things happen simultaneously in our memories. The future is happening at the same time as the past, and that’s what paintings can do. And the oval also feels like a mirror. Especially when you’re a young girl, you stick dream things on your mirror so you can look at yourself.

“I think ART is really at its most GRACEFUL and BEAUTIFUL when you give viewers the FEELING that they’re NOT ALONE in this WORLD, that there’s SOMEBODY ELSE who GETS IT.”

I’m calling this work Painter Painting, Act I because it’s really ground zero of where I started to become [me]. I like that you see this woman painter who is very [determined]. All the traits are there. I repainted what I saw from an old painting from the summer of 1984, probably August of that year. I’m wearing my little short-shorts in my childhood bedroom with that crappy little tulip lamp. That’s my childhood desk. I did my homework on that. The Polaroids that are painted in trompe l’oeil are studies for my Bad Habits paintings from 1995. I made those paintings by making figures out of Sculpey [clay] and taking Polaroids of them. The idea is that these were really breakthrough works; in this painting, I’m doing trompe l’oeil depictions of source material for work that I would make 12 years later. When I was looking at this image [1999’s Asschecker], I noticed that it’s the same pose as the painter, a contrapposto looking at her hip hiked up, and you’re looking at her butt. But I wasn’t trying to be sexy when I did this painting. That’s not my speed—or at least it wasn’t then. So I did the trompe l’oeil pasting of it in the general area of the comparison.

“I think one of my SUPERPOWERS is that over the YEARS, I LEARNED how to let people be MAD at ME.”

The gray color bars are there because I didn’t want to put any more images of my own work in. [The notes] are actually to bring it more to the present. The “Lisa Y 5M” [on the sticky] is my apartment number. I think the doorman of my building put it on a package. That makes it feel more immediate. This is a painting of a painting with ideas for paintings that the painter who is painting could not have made yet. I have always wanted to sign a painting like how Jan van Eyck did in The Arnolfini Portrait, when he wrote on the back wall, “Jan van Eyck was here.”

I’m very glad I have that muscle still, to challenge myself. Without even meeting me, I think people know I’m a boss woman, and there’s not a lot of love for that in the world. I think one of my superpowers is that over the years, I learned how to let people be mad at me. That is a superpower, especially as a woman, because you’re not doing what they want you to do. I think there’s beauty in that.