Lisa Yuskavage

Published in Phaidon's Contemporary Artists Series, this monograph presents the fullest survey to date of Lisa Yuskavage's paintings, tracking the arc of a body of work that has unsettled and reshaped expectations of figurative painting since the 1990s.

Yuskavage's paintings render female figures in lurid, theatrical color and exaggerated proportion, staging scenes that move between parody, tenderness and discomfort in equal measure. The book gathers reproductions of paintings across her career alongside essays by the journalist Ariel Levy, the critic Barry Schwabsky and the writer and filmmaker Lena Dunham, with studio photography by Jason Schmidt documenting Yuskavage's working process.

Yuskavage studied at Tyler School of Art and Yale, and emerged alongside painters like John Currin in the 1990s revival of figurative painting that treated art-historical technique as a vehicle for provocation. She has shown extensively with David Zwirner and been the subject of museum surveys internationally; this volume joins the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia's 2000 exhibition catalogue and Abrams's 2004 Small Paintings 1993-2004 as one of several monographic treatments of her work, positioned as the current standard trade survey.