lisa yuskavage’s soft bodies and studio worlds are a colorful contemplation on painting
By annalise kamegawa I designboom
At Lisa Yuskavage’s solo show at David Zwirner, New York, a stunning display of the artist’s painted and mixed-media work fill the space with pieces ranging from sprawling triptychs to bite-sized compositions. Looking at the collection all together, dotting the walls in shocks of pink and green, it looks as though Yuskavage has produced in each canvas, a zone of contemplation over the fundamental elements of the craft itself.
all exhibition images: installation view, Lisa Yuskavage, David Zwirner, New York, May 14 – June 26, 2026, courtesy David Zwirner
Looking at the show’s leading image, The Joy of Painting (2025), several of the artist’s signatures appear. It’s a painting of a studio – one filled with drawings pinned to the wall, easels abound, the paint brushes and tools of an artist sprinkled around the room. One of the most iconic staples of Yuskavage’s work is here too: the topless, affectless women that serve almost as choruses did in classical Greek dramas. They have these large, curving breasts that appear in different degrees of roundness, sun-tanned, and bouncing. They loiter around the left half of the composition, not lost, but at the same time, not particularly enraptured by anything in the vicinity. In the foreground, one of the girls is squatting, leaning curiously into the in-progress canvas that partitions the work. Her hair falls over her face as she inspects a sketched nipple the size of her hand.
This canvas depicted within a canvas becomes a sort of boundary, both metaphorical and literal. On the right side of the composition is a young woman, fully clothed, hair tied back away from her face, looking as if she just nodded off to sleep. Her golden hoops gleam in the light that falls in a half-dome across the scene. She bears a striking resemblance to the artist herself.
While the surreal, nude women amble around, contained by the depiction of femininity that divides the work, this snoozing girl sits alone, surrounded only by the drafts of her creations. Here, in The Joy of Painting, Yuskavage renders the dreamlike state of her paintings. Not only do they manifest a type of fantastical world, complete with characters, ambient lighting, and a swanky studio, but they also exist as an extension of the artist herself. They are a place of play where a multitude of selves can exist.
Lisa Yuskavage, The Joy of Painting, 2025 | courtesy the artist and David Zwirner © Lisa Yuskavage
In this show, there is also a display of the artist’s work with collage. The pieces depict the familiar Yuskavage scene: girls in a studio. But here, she expands beyond oil on linen, deploying pastel, egg tempera, gouache, and collage on Color-aid paper. These papers are reference colors that come in sets. They are typically used to help plan compositions, design built sets for theater, or brainstorm the color palette of something that will be produced. It’s a tool that the artist had once leveraged in her formative, educational years to understand color theory. By placing this medium back into her compositions, she comes full circle in her relationship with color.
A series of compositions in the show that use collage even reference this in their titles. One work is Night Classes in Color Theory, Lesson One: Green VI (2026). In this piece, marked by a grassy green background that is illuminated in a circle of light that spills into a studio, a girl in a white coat looks up onto a gray scale painting of Yuskavage’s hallmark woman. Here, the canvas is one of the Color-aid cards. Layered into the foreground are other canvases that are fashioned and pasted into a stack that approaches the viewer. The artist repeats this experimentation in several other shades of green, using the fixed form of a girl in a studio to tease out the peculiar mosses, algae, and browns that encompass this color’s range.
In her show at David Zwirner, as each of these girls appears, looking as if they’ve hopped from vignette to vignette to tell a tale of painting itself, there’s a sense that the painter herself is still trying to make sense of the medium’s composite parts. There’s a repeated reference to the studio, the site of creation. There’s a constant confrontation of the female muse. There’s a negotiation with color itself. And all of this is worked through in a thrilling range of hues, tones, and figures that invite audiences to discover this relationship to painting alongside the artist.
This article was originally published by Designboom.