Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness

Lisa Yuskavage creates ethereal, fantastical landscapes replete with voluptuous, sexualized female figures. Taking pictorial cues from old-master, romantic, and impressionist traditions, Yuskavage nevertheless broadens and challenges their conventions, adding decidedly contemporary colors, forms, and meanings to the traditional genres of landscape and portrait paintings. This exhibition, co-organized by the Aspen Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art, looks beyond the eroticism of the figure to the fantastical nature of Yuskavage’s landscapes. The artist’s outdoor scenes are grounded in familiar terrain, and yet are almost otherworldly with a supernatural force permeating their vistas. In so doing, Yuskavage explores the space of myth and fiction as it manifests in our surroundings, lending a sense of the romantic—and even the seductive—to the everyday.