Lisa Yuskavage on Bellini, Duchamp, and the Making of a Painterly World
A new podcast conversation with American artist Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962) traces the sources behind one of contemporary painting’s most distinctive imaginations. In the interview, hosted by Ben Luke and produced by David Clack, Yuskavage discusses the books, films, artists, and formative encounters that have shaped her work, from a childhood in Philadelphia to her life and studio practice in New York.
Yuskavage is known for paintings filled with stylized, often eroticized female figures placed in invented interiors and landscapes. Her work draws from art history, popular culture, and observation, but rarely settles into quotation alone. Instead, she uses those references to build scenes that feel psychologically charged, visually lush, and quietly unstable. The result is a body of work that can seem seductive and disquieting in the same glance.
In the podcast, Yuskavage reflects on what she calls the “emotional formalism” at the center of her practice. She recalls an early visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a trip to Italy that proved transformative, then describes the force of seeing a Giovanni Bellini painting in Venice. She also speaks about the continuing influence of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés, a work that has long haunted artists interested in desire, spectatorship, and the mechanics of looking.
Her references extend beyond the visual arts. Yuskavage names the poet Wallace Stevens and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick as important influences, and cites Agnes Martin, Philip Guston, and Laura Owens among the artists she admires. The conversation also turns to the rhythms of studio life and to the larger question that anchors the series: what is art for?
The podcast arrives alongside Yuskavage’s exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, on view through June 26. Together, the exhibition and the interview offer a concentrated view of an artist whose work remains deeply engaged with representation, memory, and the unstable space between reverence and revision.
