the painter at David Zwirner, New York;
At Lisa Yuskavage’s individual performance at David ZwirnerNew York, a stunning exhibition of the artist’s painting and mixed media work fills the space with pieces ranging from large triptychs to bite-sized compositions. Looking at the collection as a whole, scattering the walls in pink and green tones, it seems as if Yuskavage has created in each canvas, a zone of contemplation on the fundamentals of art itself.
all exhibition images: installation view, Lisa Yuskavage, David Zwirner, New York, May 14 – June 26, 2026, courtesy of David Zwirner
the joy of painting and the studio scene
Looking at the top image of the show, The Joy of Painting (2025), several of the artist’s signatures appear. It’s a painting of a studio – one filled with designs pinned to the wall, easels abound, brushes and an artist’s tools strewn around the room. One of the most iconic staples of Yuskavage’s work is here, too: the topless, haggard women who function almost like choruses in classical Greek dramas. They have these large, curvy breasts that appear in varying degrees of roundness, suntanned and bouncing. They wander around the left half of the composition, not lost, but at the same time, not particularly excited by anything in the vicinity. In the foreground, one of the girls is squatting, leaning curiously on the canvas in progress that divides the work. Her hair falls into her face as she inspects an outlined nipple the size of her hand.
This canvas depicted within a canvas becomes a kind of boundary, both figurative and literal. On the right side of the composition is a young woman, fully clothed, her hair tied away from her face, as if she has just nodded off to sleep. Her golden hoops glisten in the light that falls on a half-dome on the stage. It bears a striking resemblance to the artist herself.
While the surreal, naked women wander about, enmeshed in the depiction of femininity that separates the work, this cuddly girl sits alone, surrounded only by the drafts of her creations. Here at The Joy of Painting, Yuskavage conveys the dreamlike state of her works. Not only do they manifest a type of fantasy world, filled with characters, atmospheric lighting and an impressive studio, but they also exist as an extension of the artist herself. It is a play space where a multitude of selves can exist.
Lisa Yuskavage, The Joy of Painting, 2025 | courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner © Lisa Yuskavage
LISA yuskavage and color-assisted collages
In this show, the artist’s work with collages is also displayed. The pieces depict the familiar Yuskavage scene: girls in a studio. But here, he expands beyond oil on linen, developing pastels, egg tempera, gouache and collage on Color-aid paper. These papers are reference colors available in sets. They are usually used to help design compositions, design built sets for the theater, or brainstorm the color palette of something to be produced. It is a tool that the artist had once used in her formative, educational years to understand color theory. By reintroducing this medium into her compositions, she comes full circle in her relationship with color.
A number of compositions in the show that use collage even mention it in their titles. One work is Night Classes in Color Theory, Lesson One: Green VI (2026). In this piece, characterized by a green background of grass illuminated in a circle of light pouring into a studio, a girl in a white coat looks up at a grayscale painting of Yuskavage’s trademark woman. Here, the canvas is one of the Color-aid cards. In the foreground are other canvases that are shaped and pasted into a stack that approaches the viewer. The artist repeats this experimentation in several other shades of green, using the still figure of a girl in a studio to tease out the strange mosses, algae and browns that span this color spectrum.
In her show on David Zwirneras each of these girls appears, looking as if they have jumped from vignette to vignette to tell a story of the painting itself, there is a sense that the painter herself is still trying to make sense of the complex parts of the medium. There is a repeated reference to the studio, the place of creation. There is a constant juxtaposition of the female muse. There is a negotiation with the color itself. And all of this is processed in an exciting range of shades, tones and figures that invite the public to discover this relationship with painting alongside the artist.
