Tragic Land – Dublin Contemporary 2011 at the RHA

Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings have riveted global audiences since she began exhibiting in New York in the early 1990s. Since then, her fecund, no-holds barred representations of the female figure have pushed contemporary painting past pat aesthetic prohibitions and censorious instances of political correctness.
A painter’s painter whose primary purpose has long been to revitalise an age-old medium ever on the verge of obsolescence, Yuskavage confects up-to-date painted clichés of women, inverting the traditional voyeuristic treatment of the female figure.
This exhibition—only Yuskavage’s second museum show in Europe—is made up of eight canvases the artist made between 2008 and 2010. Selected by the artist herself along with the curators, the pictures feature fulsome figures in glowing drawing rooms and previously uncharacteristic landscapes. In an effort to bridge this exhibition and the larger Dublin Contemporary 2011 exhibition, the artist has also generously provided a panoramic pastel work for Dublin Contemporary’s site at Earlsfort Terrace.
Born 1962 in Philadelphia, U.S.A. Yuskavage now lives and works in New York, U.S.A.