The Lisa Yuskavage: New Paintings exhibition was among my favorite shows on my recent trip to New York.

I loved Yuskavage’s larger color-field works. Photos do not do them justice. They are absolutely extraordinary in person.

“In the more than three-meter-long Night Classes at the Department of Painting Drawing and Sculpture (2018–2020), faintly visible subjects were pulled out from the pentimenti of a deep cadmium red, yielding a dramatic yet lighthearted scene with a model and two nude students examining each other in a dreamlike state after hours.” (David Zwirner)

“In Yellow Studio (2021), a sense of danger is invoked by the hammer and nails and two-by-fours in front of a seated young woman, whose pose recalls a Hellenistic sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Scattered around her are color-aid papers used as a teaching device by Josef Albers in his famous class at Yale School of Art, “The Interaction of Color,” while other elements in the room subtly draw attention to the model’s solitary presence. The intense yet soft color scheme oscillates between real and otherworldly, as if capturing memory and imagination within a single moment.” (David Zwirner)

Below are two more paintings that I especially liked.