Beschreibung:

16 Lisa Yuskavage Northview (Impressionist Jacket) 2000 Oil on linen. 70 1/8 x 40 1/2 in. (178.1 x 102.9 cm.) Signed, titled and dated “Yuskavage © 2000 ‘Northview (Impressionist Jacket)’” on the reverse.
Provenance Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York Exhibited New York, Marianne Boesky Gallery, Lisa Yuskavage January 5 - February 3, 2001; Geneva, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Lisa Yuskavage May 17 - August 26, 2001; New York, C&M Arts, Naked Since 1950, October 11 - December 8, 2001 Catalogue Essay Each and every one of Lisa Yuskavage’s luxurious works is fundamentally about the nature of meaning and desire as expressed through painting. Her paintings are exquisitely rendered, depicting highly charged images of young women and revealing a deeper level of purpose or intent. Yuskavage’s work simultaneously addresses myriad issues, some more clearly and overtly than others. In experiencing her work, these conflicting tensions well up within the viewer, delivering a highly keyed aesthetic impact. As Yuskavage, who rarely discusses the meaning of her work has stated, “I only load the gun”. This simple, yet poignant statement implies that regardless of the subject matter, to her, it’s all about the set up, and that the “best way to approach [her] work is to recognize what it makes you think about and then think of the opposite” (Yuskavage in conversation with Robert Enright, “The Overwhelmer: The Art of Lisa Yuskavage”, Border Crossings, no. 103, August 2007, pp. 36-48). Yuskavage, with her confrontational approach, seems intent to simultaneously oth seduce and repel the viewer. She asks us both to look and admire her ensual (although often exaggerated) nude girls and at the same time to move ast the notion of the traditional “male gaze”. Positing a new way to engage he desire of the eye, Yuskavage sets out to examine the expanse between nd interconnections within the worlds of 1970s soft focus pornography and raditional images of the female beauty as rendered by old master such as Vermeer, Bellini, Bronzino and Rembrandt. As Enright recounts, “Yuskavage has remarked that one of her intentions was to combine Rembrandt with colour-field painting to which she might have added, and the sensibility of early Penthouse magazine” (Yuskavage in conversation with Robert Enright, “The Overwhelmer: The Art of Lisa Yuskavage”, Border Crossings, no. 103, August 2007, pp. 36-48). From her exploration of art history, Yuskavage has gleaned many lessons from masters both old and new on how to handle perspective, employ color, and reproduce light and texture in order to captivate the viewer. She claims, however, in her discussion with Enright that one must be careful when doing so, and to ensure that you approach your own practice with a firm sense of yourself in the present, otherwise you would end up producing some sort of anachronistic art, a fear of being out of time. It is the fusion of the technical skill and mastery of these classic techniques that she employs coupled with her contemporary renderings of the most widely utilized subject matter in the Western world, the female nude, which allows for Yuskavage’s work to so successfully communicate a more robust and conflicted vision of feminine beauty. Besides the obvious tangible result of her process, her paintings are imbued with the power to transcend the boundaries or template of typical nude female imagery and force a second, deeper look or investigation into several paradoxes including “voyeurism and exhibitionism, feminism and misogyny and the personal and the psychosocial.” (C. Viveros-Fauné, “Cursed Beauty: The Painting of Lisa Yuskavage and the Goosing of the Great Tradition”, Lisa Yuskavage Mexico City, 2006, p. 62). The first two of these paradoxes, voyeurism and exhibitionism and feminism and misogyny, mainly pertain to her works’ relationship to pornography. Yuskavage readily admits that her work is indeed indebted in some ways to pornography, and Peter Schjeldahl relates that her work “paraphrases images of girlie pulchritude from old skin magazines and from photographs that she takes of models” (P. Schjeldahl, “Girls, Girls, Girls: Lisa Yuskavage raises trashiness to high art”, The