Small Paintings 1993-2004

Small Paintings 1993-2004 gathers a decade of Lisa Yuskavage's smaller-format paintings, in which candy-colored light and cartoonishly exaggerated female bodies push figurative painting toward the territory of pin-up and pornographic imagery, then unsettle it from within.

The book reproduces the paintings largely without the mediating context of a gallery installation, letting the recurring cast of nude and semi-nude figures accumulate across the decade covered. It includes an essay and explanatory diagrams by the filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and was published by Harry N. Abrams in New York in 2004.

Yuskavage is an American painter whose work, since the early 1990s, has used exaggerated, doll-like female figures to interrogate desire, shame, and the history of painting's own objectification of women. Small Paintings 1993-2004 sits within a substantial body of monographs and exhibition catalogues devoted to her painting.