lisa yuskavage's soft bodies and studio worlds are a colorful contemplation on painting

The exhibition presents painted and mixed-media works ranging from large triptychs to small compositions. The walls are filled with vivid pink and green, creating an overall sense of focused reflection on the fundamental elements of painting. The leading work, The Joy of Painting (2025), depicts a studio with drawings pinned to the wall, easels, and scattered brushes and tools. The scene includes Yuskavage’s recurring topless, affectless women, shown as if they are present but not emotionally engaged. A squatting figure leans into an in-progress canvas, inspecting a sketched nipple. A fully clothed woman on the right side appears drowsy, with light falling in a half-dome across the scene.

"At Lisa Yuskavage's 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."

"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."

Read at designboom | architecture & design magazine