Lisa Yuskavage Fireplace 2010. All images courtesy of David Zwirner

Those visiting David Zwirner’s Chelsea gallery this month will find themselves in the provocative company of a series of lurid, disrobed figures, polished with the curious appearances of feral angels. These cherubic yet licentious effigies feature recurrently in the imagination of Lisa Yuskavage, here in her third solo exhibition with the gallery; feminine forms uncloaked before vivid, polychromatic dreamscapes, depicted in candy-hued, saccharine palettes.
     “I have always worked, even as an undergraduate, with the subject of women, because that’s what made sense to me, it was as if I was an actress and that (the subject) was the protagonist that I was working through. Inevitably, people will ask me – when are you going to paint a man? It would be like asking Meryl Streep – when are you going to go in drag?”
     Emerging onto the New York arts scene in the late 90s, amongst contemporaries such as John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton, Yuskavage’s brand of feminine lasciviousness has consistently proven to mystify and bemuse, provoke vehement feminist discord and analysis through the prism of gender politics – yet, the paintings remain products of distinctly personal realms; intrinsic psychological divulgences,