Lisa Yuskavage

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. 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.