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Lot Essay
In the extended wake of Feminism, Lisa Yuskavage seems the ultimate provocateur, relishing in depictions of hyper-sexualized female stereotypes that shock contemporary sensibilities. She refuses to condemn her babelicious damsels, choosing to approach them with an unresolved and complicated stance that is both critical and deeply empathetic. In presenting women who are burdened with sexual attributes that may be all the world chooses to see in them, she forces recognition of a culture that continues to consume such imagery. Yuskavage's characters are exaggerated fictions, but their navigation of femininity is real.
The pre-pubescent girl in Couch dawns on the realization of her own sexual allure. Childhood--still apparent in her cherubic face--is overtaken by the budding physical traits of womanhood which she accepts and presents with voluptuous submission. She reclines in the traditional pose of the seductress displaying her luscious wares to full advantage. It is no coincidence that she looks like a doll; indeed, she offers herself as an object to be played with. And yet, through all her role playing, her eyes cloud over with questions of the possibility of something more, something real. She longs to be taken for a person and not a sexual object, but in a world that continues to gratify the male gaze, she does not know how. Her entrapment is suggested by the framed images that hang above her bed, mini-versions of other paintings by Yuskavage, which treat women as sex symbols and influence the young girl's emerging consciousness of herself as being of their ilk.
By using Couch to propagate her own oeuvre, the artist ingeniously draws parallels between society's propagation of stereotypes through the prevalence of images. For all the gender politics that seem to simmer in her work, Yuskavage is primarily interested in painting, and dares the viewer into transcending content to focus on process. She revisits classic techniques of modeling, coloring, texture and, above all, light, and displays a delicious painterliness worthy of Venetian masters. Her painstaking methods involve numerous preparatory drawings and the creation of figurines from which to observe the reflection and refraction of light. The soft mauve light that infiltrates the painting is as seductive and opulent as its nubile occupant and, in its airbrushed perfection, reveals a sensuality that the artist experiences from the formal act of creation.
Yuskavage believes in the transforming beauty of pigment suspended in oil on canvas and the ability of that beauty to suggest transcendence. Even though she paints ignoble subjects, she does so in ennobling format suggesting that even they deserve to be elevated as art. As she paints the shallow, the vulgar and the heedless as if they were profound, elegant and meditative, she reminds us obliquely that even in the ostensible absence of these qualities there is the enduring possibility of their resonance.
The pre-pubescent girl in Couch dawns on the realization of her own sexual allure. Childhood--still apparent in her cherubic face--is overtaken by the budding physical traits of womanhood which she accepts and presents with voluptuous submission. She reclines in the traditional pose of the seductress displaying her luscious wares to full advantage. It is no coincidence that she looks like a doll; indeed, she offers herself as an object to be played with. And yet, through all her role playing, her eyes cloud over with questions of the possibility of something more, something real. She longs to be taken for a person and not a sexual object, but in a world that continues to gratify the male gaze, she does not know how. Her entrapment is suggested by the framed images that hang above her bed, mini-versions of other paintings by Yuskavage, which treat women as sex symbols and influence the young girl's emerging consciousness of herself as being of their ilk.
By using Couch to propagate her own oeuvre, the artist ingeniously draws parallels between society's propagation of stereotypes through the prevalence of images. For all the gender politics that seem to simmer in her work, Yuskavage is primarily interested in painting, and dares the viewer into transcending content to focus on process. She revisits classic techniques of modeling, coloring, texture and, above all, light, and displays a delicious painterliness worthy of Venetian masters. Her painstaking methods involve numerous preparatory drawings and the creation of figurines from which to observe the reflection and refraction of light. The soft mauve light that infiltrates the painting is as seductive and opulent as its nubile occupant and, in its airbrushed perfection, reveals a sensuality that the artist experiences from the formal act of creation.
Yuskavage believes in the transforming beauty of pigment suspended in oil on canvas and the ability of that beauty to suggest transcendence. Even though she paints ignoble subjects, she does so in ennobling format suggesting that even they deserve to be elevated as art. As she paints the shallow, the vulgar and the heedless as if they were profound, elegant and meditative, she reminds us obliquely that even in the ostensible absence of these qualities there is the enduring possibility of their resonance.