{"id":2454528,"date":"2020-02-13T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=320786"},"modified":"2020-02-13T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T23:00:00","slug":"lisa-yuskavages-fantastical-landscapes-at-the-aspen-art-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/lisa-yuskavages-fantastical-landscapes-at-the-aspen-art-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Lisa Yuskavage\u2019s fantastical landscapes at the Aspen Art Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Painter Lisa Yuskavage’s solo exhibition “Wilderness” will open Saturday night at the Aspen Art Museum.<\/strong>
Amanda Webster\/Courtesy David Zwirner<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Nobody thinks of Lisa Yuskavage as a landscape painter. Not yet, at least, as she\u2019s been defined by her revolutionary approach to figurative painting over the past two decades.<\/p>\n

But the Aspen Art Museum is determined to change that with Yuskavage\u2019s major solo exhibition \u201cWilderness,\u201d opening Saturday night. Hanging new pieces along with work spanning back to watercolors from the early 1990s, this 44-piece show focuses not on her acclaimed erotic nudes and the pornography-inspired works that led New York Times critic Roberta Smith to dub Yuskavage<\/a> \u201cthe premier bad-girl painter of the naughty late 1990s.\u201d<\/p>\n

No, this show wants you to pay attention to what Yuskavage has been doing in the background. There, you\u2019ll find groundbreaking landscapes ranging from the romantic to the apocalyptic. It\u2019s a journey from Eden to Hell and back.<\/p>\n

It is curated by former Aspen Art Museum director Heidi Zuckerman and organized in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it will travel from Aspen this summer. The exhibition is Zuckerman\u2019s finale at the museum, where she served as director from 2005 to 2019 and made these kinds of tightly curated shows \u2014 highlighting an overlooked aspect of a well-known contemporary artist\u2019s practice \u2014 an institutional signature.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is to look at her work from a nontraditional perspective,\u201d Zuckerman said in August, when Yuskavage made her first visit to Aspen to receive the museum\u2019s Aspen Award for Art. The prize, awarded since 2005, has previously gone to luminaries like Ed Ruscha, Marilyn Minter, Teresita Fernandez and Rashid Johnson.<\/p>\n

A breakthrough moment for Yuskavage came during her graduate studies in the 1980s at Yale, when she began painting self-portraits of herself during a period of depression in her bed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the first time I manipulated an audience \u2014 which was the faculty \u2014 because they were shocked to see where I was psychologically,\u201d she recalled during an August talk in Aspen.<\/p>\n

Yuskavage soon moved away from depicting her physical self, but she\u2019s kept her mind and spirit in all of her work since then.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething important was that I couldn\u2019t not be in my work,\u201d she explained. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing wrong with painting a still life. But if I was going to paint it, I had to make it very personal.\u201d<\/p>\n

From that instinct came early pieces like her watercolor still-lifes of fruit that were interspersed subtly with intimate body parts \u2014 pieces like her \u201cSweet Thing,\u201d in which a human butt is glimpsed alongside apples and grapes.<\/p>\n

In her \u201cTit Heaven\u201d series, dreamy jungle-like greenery and flowers are portrayed blooming in misty landscapes, where breasts also dimly emerge. The series marked the beginning of her long-overlooked work in landscape, upon which the Aspen show focuses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that they had to be very personal landscape paintings,\u201d she said. \u201cThere had to be something about them that was true to me, that couldn\u2019t be generic.\u201d<\/p>\n

This use of watercolor emerged quite accidentally for Yuskavage back then. The struggling young artist got a gig teaching a watercolor class for a continuing education group she dubbed \u201cblue stocking ladies.\u201d Yuskavage bought a basic watercolor instructor\u2019s manual to prepare, and found herself with this fruitful exploration of the medium.<\/p>\n

The Aspen show will position these early pieces as a sort of Rosetta Stone for the monumental, acclaimed and often-controversial paintings that Yuskavage made in the decades to come, as her work found its way into permanent collections at institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.<\/p>\n

The most talked-about of her works are the nudes, where the sacred and the profane collide in cartoonishly curvy women and sensual scenes, where she has demonstrated an uncanny ability to craft fully realized characters on the canvas who are as confounding as live human beings.<\/p>\n

Yuskavage has most often drawn them from her imagination, without models. But for a period she modeled her characters from the pornographic photos in Penthouse magazines.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was interested in playing with it and hitting the third rail,\u201d Yuskavage explained.<\/p>\n

The pieces sparked controversy, of course, but she took it in stride and came to trust audiences with her work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you make work like mine, and it\u2019s taken years because I\u2019ve been doing it for a long time, you have to accept a range of presumptions about yourself,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Yuskavage\u2019s fantastical women have drawn most of the popular attention for her work, but the backgrounds are rich texts in themselves \u2014 whether it\u2019s the saturated yellow color field behind a nude blonde or the breast-shaped hills and big cloudy green sky in the background of her massive \u201cTriptych,\u201d the distant blue horizon out the window behind her portrait of a large-rumped woman dubbed \u201cHam Ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

More recent works have placed her characters in lush, Eden-like scenes and in dystopian landscapes which range from the fun to the frightening, and she has imagined pastoral countrysides and jagged mountains under ominous skies. Sometimes, they\u2019re all on one canvas, as in \u201cWilderness,\u201d where verdant green hills roll far in the distance from a trio of women on an on rocky cliffside under a bruised red sky.<\/p>\n

Viewers in Aspen will feel right at home in these stretches of the artist\u2019s imagination. If Yuskavage\u2019s landscapes are going to get their due, Aspen is an appropriate place to do it. When she arrived here for the first time last year, she remarked, \u201cIt\u2019s exactly like the landscape in my paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Painter Lisa Yuskavage’s solo exhibition “Wilderness” will open Saturday night at the Aspen Art Museum.Amanda Webster\/Courtesy David Zwirner Nobody thinks of Lisa Yuskavage as a landscape painter. Not yet, at least, as she\u2019s been defined by her revolutionary approach to figurative painting over the past two decades. But the Aspen Art Museum is determined to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2454528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-18 15:52:05","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2454528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2454528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2454528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2454528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2454528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}