Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood
Small Paintings, 1985–2018
Text by Jarrett Earnest. Foreword by Hanna Schouwink
Lisa Yuskavage: Babie Brood is the first survey of the artist’s small-scale paintings. While Yuskavage is primarily known for larger canvases, these intimate works offer a new window into her transgressive paintings and complex and influential oeuvre.
Based on the artist’s imagination, live models, maquettes, and found and staged photographs, the small paintings in this book demonstrate Yuskavage’s methodical exploration of how images are created and their sources. Some of the small works are studies for large paintings, while others revisit preexisting images. Yet others are one-of-a-kind compositions only created on this intimate scale. As places for experimenting with color, form, and characters as well as a variety of formats—including stretched and unstretched linen, canvas boards, wood, and paper—these paintings play a remarkably dynamic and pivotal role within her work. This catalogue presents the paintings to scale so readers can explore the works as if seeing them in person.
Documenting the artist’s exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018, this catalogue includes an essay by Jarrett Earnest that illuminates Yuskavage’s early influences and explores the constant, often surprising themes that can be found throughout her art.
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Artists: Lisa Yuskavage
Contributors: Jarrett Earnest, Hanna Schouwink
Designer: Studio: Blackwell
Printer: VeronaLibri, Verona
Publication Date: 2019
Binding: Hardcover
Dimensions: 8 1/2 × 10 1/2 in | 21.6 × 26.7 cm
Pages: 192
Reproductions: 114 color
ISBN: 9781644230145
Retail: $60 | £45 | €62
Status: Available
Lisa Yuskavage
Lisa Yuskavage’s works are characterized by an ongoing engagement with the history of painting. Her oeuvre bears witness to a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting and takes its point of departure in part in the immediacy and tawdriness of contemporary life spurred by the mass media and the psycho-social realm of the individual. Over the past two decades, she has developed her own genre of the female nude: lavish, erotic, cartoonish, vulgar, angelic young women cast within fantastical landscapes or dramatically lit interiors. They appear to occupy their own realm while narcissistically contemplating themselves and their bodies. Rich, atmospheric skies frequently augment the psychologically charged mood, further adding to the impression of theatricality and creative possibility.
Jarrett Earnest
Jarrett Earnest is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) as well as editor of The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955 (2020), Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993 (2021), and Devotion: today’s future becomes tomorrow archive (2022). His criticism has been published in magazines and exhibition catalogues around the world and appears regularly in the New York Review of Books.
Hanna Schouwink
Hanna Schouwink joined David Zwirner in 1997 and is a senior partner based in the gallery’s New York location. Throughout the past two decades, she has overseen numerous shows at the gallery and collaborated on many major museum exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe and their accompanying publications.
