School of Art Lecture Series: An Evening with Lisa Yuskavage

Pratt Institute’s School of Art presents an evening with Lisa Yuskavage
Lisa Yuskavage in conversation with Christopher Bedford

For more than thirty years, Lisa Yuskavage’s highly original approach to figurative painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre. Her simultaneously bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. At times playful and harmonious, and at other times rueful and conflicted, these characters are cast within fantastical compositions in which realistic and abstract elements coexist and color determines meaning. While the artist’s painterly techniques evoke art historical precedents, her motifs are often inspired by popular culture, creating an underlying dichotomy between high and low and, by implication, sacred and profane, harmony and dissonance. Yet her oeuvre compellingly resists categorization, insisting instead on its own kind of emotional formalism in which characters and pictorial inventions assume equal importance.

The artist will be in conversation with Christopher Bedford, the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art. In 2020, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Aspen Art Museum will co-organize a solo presentation of the artist’s work.

Works by Yuskavage are currently on view at David Zwirner through December 20 in concurrent exhibitions: the first survey of the artist’s small-scale paintings, which have been a constant and integral part of her oeuvre since the mid-1980s, is on view at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street. An exhibition of eight new large paintings are on view at the 34 East 69th Street location.

The event is free and open to the public.

Image: Lisa Yuskavage, Home, 2018; © Lisa Yuskavage; Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner