“The fact that Lisa Yuskavage does bear up under the tensions inherent in her style, and has been doing so for some 15 years now, may account for the fact that her work gives me such an otherwise inexplicable sense of jubilation. Because the work contains this tension, it is almost impossible not to be both attracted and repelled by it—and when experienced with a certain degree of intensity, this attraction/repulsion becomes a species of the sublime.”
B athed in luxurious golden light, a young woman lounges in her upholstered chair, a long string of pearls tumbling down between her bare and cartoonishly perky breasts. Executed in 2002, Kathy is emblematic of Lisa Yuskavage’s ability to combine startling and provocative subject matter with virtuosic painterly technique and allusions to art-historical motifs. The painting sparkles with a soft, all-over golden luminosity—yet beneath the surface, its deft juxtapositions of traditionally highbrow and lowbrow imagery coalesce into a clever examination of female agency and sexualization.
Yuskavage is a masterful synthesizer of visual culture. Rendered in lush, candy-colored hues, her figures evoke at once the porcelain perfection of Barbie dolls, the cheeky pornographic nudes of her contemporary John Currin, and the exaggerated contours of Italian Mannerist painting. Kathy is no exception; with its goldenrod tones, profile composition, and refined furnishings, the present work recalls Jean Honoré Fragonard’s Young Girl Reading from 1769, one of the French artist’s idealized “fantasy paintings.” Yet whereas Fragonard’s young lady symbolizes the female ideals of the time through her demure and dainty appearance, Yuskavage’s subject is confident in her own unabashed sexuality. Her hair shaggy and tousled, Kathy leans back in her chair and gazes upwards into the distance with a tantalizingly defiant glint in her eye, wrestling back control of her own narrative.
