Lisa Yuskavage + Christopher Bedford, The Brood

On the occasion of the publication of Lisa Yuskavage: The Brood, Paintings 1991–2015, the acclaimed American artist converses with Christopher Bedford, Director of The Rose Art Museum and the curator of The Brood, the museum’s exhibition of the artist’s work.

Created in close collaboration with Yuskavage, this beautifully produced monograph is published in conjunction with the major solo exhibition, spanning twenty-five years of the artist’s work, opening at The Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts , which will then travel to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Filled with extraordinary color plates and personally selected archival images, this comprehensive book offers a rich overview of her brilliant and controversial paintings, along with interpretive essays by Bedford and leading art historians, a text by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and physician, and an interview with the artist by art historian and curator Katy Siegel. The Brood promises to be the definitive publication on this important artist.

Yuskavage’s works are characterized by an ongoing engagement with the history of painting. Her oeuvre bears witness to a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting and takes its point of departure in part in the immediacy and tawdriness of contemporary life spurred by the mass media and the psycho-social realm of the individual. Over the past two decades, she has developed her own genre of the female nude: lavish, erotic, cartoonish, vulgar, angelic young women cast within fantastical landscapes or dramatically lit interiors. They appear to occupy their own realm while narcissistically contemplating themselves and their bodies. Rich, atmospheric skies frequently augment the psychologically charged mood, further adding to the impression of theatricality and creative possibility.

The An Artist Dialogue Series events are organized by Arezoo Moseni.

Lisa Yuskavage, born in Philadelphia, received her B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University and her M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art. Since 2005, the artist’s work has been represented by David Zwirner in New York. In 2006, two solo exhibitions were concurrently presented at David Zwirner and Zwirner & Wirth, followed by shows at the gallery in 2009, 2011, and 2015. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions worldwide.

Christopher Bedford is the Henry and Lois Foster Director of The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Since joining The Rose in September of 2012, he has organized exhibitions by Walead Beshty, Mark Bradford, Chris Burden, and Mika Rottenberg, in addition to the new exhibition initiatives Rose Projects and Rose Video. Prior to joining The Rose, Bedford was Chief Curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus. In his almost four years at the Wexner Center, Bedford organized numerous exhibitions.

•