Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings
Nolan Kelly | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st September 2025
Yuskavage knows that her impolitic paintings give her a “bad girl” image. She trained in the “highbrow” European figurative tradition but married that with a “lowbrow” vulgar sexuality from popular culture. That contains a tension that attracts much attention, creepy figures depicted with great technical proficiency. She references how women have been portrayed in western art, but the final product still leaves viewers uneasy – is this “the straight-A student [or] the back-of-class troublemaker”?