A brush with... Lisa Yuskavage

About this episode

Lisa Yuskavage discusses her artistic influences and the cultural experiences that have shaped her work.

In this first episode of the new series, Lisa Yuskavage talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Yuskavage, was born in Philadelphia in 1962 and lives today in New York, makes paintings that involve a cast of stylised and often eroticised, mostly female characters set within invented interiors and landscapes. Deeply engaged with the history of art and representation, Lisa’s pictures explore centuries-old traditions and genres and play with them, along a sliding scale from homage to subversion, sometimes within the space of one canvas. Her figures can derive from everyday observation, draw from soft-porn magazines or a wealth of other pop-cultural sources, or quote from historic paintings. But set within enigmatic spaces, accompanied by a range of props and objects, and allied to Lisa’s intoxicating colour sense, they are encapsulated in a singular realm of imagination and unleashed into the peculiar communion between this artist and us—one which can be delightful and disquieting, often at once. She reflects on the “emotional formalism” at the heart…

People in this episode

Host: Ben Luke

Guest: Lisa Yuskavage

Topics covered

• art influences
• cultural experiences
• female representation
• art history
• emotional formalism

Keywords

• Lisa Yuskavage
• Ben Luke
• art influences
• female characters
• art history
• Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Giovanni Bellini
• Marcel Duchamp

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Philadelphia Museum of Art

Books & works: Giovanni Bellini, Étant Donnés

Places: Philadelphia, New York

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