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One of the most original and influential artists of the past three decades, Lisa Yuskavage creates works that affirm the integrity of her media (painting, drawing and printmaking) while challenging conventional art historical precedents. At once confrontational and meditative, her works blur the boundaries between high and low art, exploring traditional genres—the nude, portraiture, landscape and still life—with a contemporary eye to issues of female transgression and empowerment rooted in popular culture.
Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings is the first comprehensive museum presentation of the artist’s drawings. Incorporating drawings from the early nineties to the present and including sketches and finished studies, the exhibition will feature a wide range of her explorations with materials including work in graphite, pen, Conte, pastel, charcoal, distemper, monotype, gouache, watercolor, acrylic and ink on paper. It will chart Yuskavage’s career-long inquiry into how process and material experimentation create entirely new ways to find images. From her earliest drawings of imagined figures and still lives, through a period of investigation into what constitutes a model, to her recent studio and landscape scenes synthesizing the real and the imagined into a new kind of fictional reality, Yuskavage’s drawings give insight into the way we see and comprehend the world. Within the jewel-like space of the Thaw Gallery, the exhibition provides an immersive experience, allowing the viewer to enter the artist’s mind.