Lisa Yuskavage (American, b.1962) is a painter known for producing sexualized paintings of real and imagined female figures. Yuskavage was born in Philadelphia, PA, and received her BFA in 1984 from The Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. She received her MFA from Yale University's School of Art, New Haven, CT, in 1986.
Yuskavage has always been interested in the history of painting, and she is one of the modern artists whose works represent the reemergence of the Figurative in Contemporary painting. For the past twenty years, she has been developing her own genre of nude female figures that are mostly erotic, lavish, cartoonish, and angelic. Most of these paintings feature fantastical landscapes or dramatically lit interiors. Examples of her paintings include Honeymoon (1998), Kingdom (2006), and Violet Quilt (2009). Critics have described Yuskavage's paintings as anatomically impossible bimbos or nymphets, while Yuskavage claims that her figures represent far-out extensions of male sexual fantasies. The artist says that she wants to elicit different reactions from the public, just like her painting peers.
Yuskavage has received several awards and grants, including the Zimtbaum Foundation Fellowship, from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA, in 1986, the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, in 1994, and the Tiffany Foundation Grant, in 1996. Her public collections can be seen in places such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. In 2000, Yuskavage was included in the Whitney Biennial. Yuskavage has been involved in many exhibitions, both solo and group. Her solo exhibitions include those at Studio Guenzani, in Milan, Italy, in 1997, and at David Zwirner, in New York, in 2009. Examples of the group exhibitions she has participated in include She's Come Undone, at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren, in New York in 2004, and The Present: The Monique Zajfen Collection, at Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam in 2007. Yuskavage is represented by David Zwirner. The artist currently lives and works in New York.