| New WorkOctober 18, 2006- November 18, 2006Reception: October 18, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Opening on October 18, 2006, David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth are pleased to present concurrent exhibitions of paintings and drawings by New York artist Lisa Yuskavage. Yuskavage had recent solo exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Mexico (2006), the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2001) and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA (2000). Major group exhibitions include the Fifth International Biennial: Disparities and Deformations, Our Grotesque, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2004); Supernova: Art of the 1990s from the Logan Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2003); de Kooning to Today: Highlights from the Permanent Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2003); 2000 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2000); and Greater New York, P.S.1/The Museum of Modern ! Art, New York, NY (2000). In 2007, Yuskavage will participate in America Today: 300 Years of Art from the USA at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. These will be the artist’s first exhibitions at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth.
Known for paintings of women, Lisa Yuskavage’s images occupy the space between high and low; the sacred and the profane. Many of these new works explore a complex psychological direction – specifically, symbiotic relationships. Influenced in part by images that depict power struggles, including Baroque sculptures (specifically Gianlorenzo Bernini) and Giorgio de Chirico’s late “Gladiator” paintings, Yuskavage’s “figures” hover or climb upon one another – caught in embraces that appear to shift between tenderness and violence. Within these paradoxical relationships, it is often difficult to decipher what is real and what is imagined; what is weighted and what is weightless; what is made of paint and what transcends the medium entirely. Yuskavage’s subtle degrees of fiction and representation culminate in questionable, unsettling quasi-realities.
On display at Zwirner & Wirth will be a selection of recent drawings and small oil paintings; the Chelsea exhibition will feature Yuskavage’s new, large canvases. In Ledge (2005), paint is personified by two female entities through which empathy and apathy are suggested, yet are nearly indistinguishable. In Imprint (2006), within which two women seem to meld into one, malleable form, Yuskavage interprets the flat, illusionistic space of bas-relief sculpture through the use of close color and punctuations of extreme contrast at the points of human contact.
Reviews of New WorkNew York Times
November 10, 2006 | | Jeffrey Kastner | | "...Yet these paintings also hold clues to the evolution of Ms. Yuskavage’s program. Her transgressive tightrope act between feeding and interrogating the male gaze is now more rewarding because she has endowed her characters not simply with dramatic curves, but also with an increasingly vivid inner life...." | Village Voice
November 9, 2006 | | Jerry Saltz | | "...Unfortunately, everyone—including, I think, Yuskavage—has now shifted the discussion away from the uncomfortable sexuality and psychology presented in these works toward something more palatable and polite. Instead of being about sex, dirty secrets, doubt, and storm-tossed desire, the conversation around Yuskavage's work has devolved into a totally bogus discourse about skill. Because the subject matter is no longer embarrassing, tantalizing, or repellant, everyone has fallen back on the infinitely inane, absolutely empty incorrect cliché: "She paints so skillfully."..." |
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