The Joy of Painting

Lisa Yuskavage’s show at Zwirner in New York is a painters painting show, much like the Richter show around the corner. It’s about the joy of painting, the story of a painting, the story of a studio, the story of how an imagination carries a vision through a series of works. One of the things that stood out to me in particular is that Yuskavage paints about ideas, and in the work, you can see how as she is working on one painting, another is on her mind, and the characters begin to encircle to the point where everything blends and melds together. She is painting paintings about painting and about the way her brain works. It’s endlessly fascinating.

“I keep on thinking about the way in which your memories – and the way you flip through remembering things – are forms of discarded masterpieces,” Yuskavage said to the gallery. “There are these rectangular forms in the picture, some of which have things rendered on them ... and then there’s this tumbling bunch of color-field-flat-things – paintings, we assume. And I was just thinking that it’s almost like going through your own history, and there’s some things that you discarded, and that you want to bring back.”

This is where the magic is in her works. She is showing you how memory works and where the sparks of her creativity come from. They are nuanced looks into both her own mind and memory, but the function of a studio itself. She layers and gives depth to her memories, she sucks you into portals, all the while you are aware of the infrastructure of where her mind is: it’s in the process of always making. Painting about painting.

The show is wonderfully laid out. There is room to breathe. You can time with the works, and it lets you take in the cinematic nature of the figurative, fantasy arrangements in front of you. Big paintings need space. Even the brilliant works on paper are given room, and even though I could have looked at hundreds, just the few felt important and impactful.

It was Van Gogh who once said, maybe or maybe not sober, “I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.” That is the essence here of how Lisa constructs these, again, I must use the word, these portals. It’s her diary but also her film. It’s a big, monumental show for a monumental and increasingly urgent and important artist. —Evan Pricco