For Lisa Yuskavage, painting has never been simply a matter of depicting the world. It is a way of constructing one.

That idea came sharply into focus in her 2026 New York exhibition at David Zwirner, where new and recent paintings and works on paper transformed the gallery into an imagined studio—one populated by paintings within paintings, recurring figures, fragments of memory, and fields of saturated color. Running May 14 through June 26 at the gallery’s 533 West 19th Street location, the exhibition marked Yuskavage’s tenth solo presentation with David Zwirner and twenty years since her first exhibition with the gallery in 2006.

Rather than treating her earlier work as a closed chapter, Yuskavage used the exhibition to revisit and reorganize her own visual history. The result was less a conventional survey than a self-reflexive environment in which paintings appear to remember other paintings—and where the boundaries between artist, image, studio, and viewer become deliberately unstable.

The Studio as a State of Mind

Many of the exhibition’s paintings appear to depict studios, easels, canvases, and works-in-progress. But David Zwirner emphasizes that these spaces are better understood as existing within the artist’s imagination.

That distinction is important.

The studio becomes a psychological architecture where time can fold backward and forward. Earlier images return as objects inside new paintings; blank canvases suggest possibilities rather than absence; and paintings seem to become characters in an ongoing story.

In Endless Studio (portal) (2025), a triptych measuring more than 15 feet across, the studio becomes almost cinematic in scale. Gigantic Studio, Act II (2026), meanwhile, expands the motif into a monumental oil painting, reinforcing Yuskavage’s interest in the studio as both physical workplace and imaginative theater.

The effect is recursive: a painting contains another painting, which appears to contain another memory.

Figuration Meets Color-Field Painting

Yuskavage is widely recognized for her figurative paintings, particularly her provocative depictions of the body. Yet the 2026 exhibition made unusually visible another longstanding concern: the history and possibilities of abstraction.

David Zwirner notes that her engagement with Color Field painting becomes particularly pronounced in these works. Rather than abandoning figuration, Yuskavage introduces trompe-l’oeil effects and constructed pictorial devices that draw attention to the flatness of the painted surface.

This creates one of the exhibition’s central tensions. A painted object may look convincingly three-dimensional, yet the illusion simultaneously reminds viewers that they are looking at paint on a surface.

The paintings therefore occupy an unstable territory between representation and abstraction. A figure can function as a recognizable person while also becoming a shape, a color event, or a formal component of the composition.

For Yuskavage, illusion is not necessarily an escape from abstraction. It can become a route toward it.

Color as Memory

Color is one of the most persistent forces in Yuskavage’s practice, and the exhibition connects that interest directly to her education.

As an art student, Yuskavage worked with Color-aid decks to create color studies. That early experience resurfaces in the new Night Classes in Color Theory works, which incorporate green Color-aid paper alongside pastel, gouache, egg tempera, and collage.

The result is a fascinating reversal. What once served as an educational tool becomes material for mature artworks.

Works such as Night Classes in Color Theory, Lesson One: Green IV, Green V, Green VI, and Green VII transform color exercises into intimate compositions. The pieces also reveal how Yuskavage’s interest in color extends beyond decoration. Color becomes atmosphere, spatial illusion, memory, and emotional temperature.

Her own explanation is revealing: she has described a long search for ways to make “color as air or atmosphere,” experimenting across media and carrying lessons from one process into another.

A New Medium: Collage

One of the most significant developments in the exhibition was Yuskavage’s introduction of collage as a new medium within her practice.

The collage works use Color-aid paper as a ground and combine materials such as pastel, egg tempera, gouache, and pasted elements. Some incorporate fragments of Yuskavage’s own imagery, but the purpose is not simply quotation.

Instead, the artist uses collage to reconstruct the processes behind her paintings.

David Zwirner describes these works as moving beyond straightforward re-presentation: they reenact artistic techniques embedded in Yuskavage’s earlier work, while the paintings themselves simulate the appearance of constructed spaces.

That distinction helps explain the exhibition’s broader preoccupation with making and remaking.

Yuskavage is not simply looking backward. She is asking what happens when an artist begins to treat her own history as raw material.

From Small Paintings to Monumental Worlds

Scale also plays a crucial role.

Yuskavage has made small paintings throughout her career, and these intimate works remain central to her process. In the 2026 exhibition, however, small and monumental works were placed into dialogue with one another.

An intimate painting such as Easel Portrait (2025), measuring less than ten inches across, exists within the same conceptual universe as expansive works such as Gigantic Studio, Act II.

This constant movement between enlargement and reduction produces an almost fractal effect. Images recur at different scales, characters shift in importance, and objects inside paintings can become paintings themselves.

The viewer is consequently encouraged to move through the exhibition as if navigating a continuously expanding mental space.

After the Morgan: Drawing, Process, and the Search for Images

The David Zwirner exhibition also arrived at an important moment in Yuskavage’s New York career.

From June 2025 through January 4, 2026, The Morgan Library & Museum presented Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings, the first comprehensive museum exhibition devoted to her works on paper. The exhibition brought together drawings from the early 1990s through the present and demonstrated how Yuskavage has used graphite, pastel, charcoal, gouache, watercolor, acrylic, ink, and other media to continually reinvent her approach to image-making.

Seen in that context, the new works at David Zwirner suggest an artist for whom medium is not fixed.

Drawing informs painting. Painting becomes collage. Color studies become finished works. Earlier paintings become elements within later paintings.

The boundaries between preparation and finished image begin to disappear.

Painting as Its Own Subject

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Yuskavage’s 2026 exhibition is its insistence that painting can turn inward without becoming merely self-referential.

Her characters, studios, canvases, and color fields ultimately point toward the same question: what happens when painting becomes conscious of its own history?

The answer is not nostalgia.

Instead, Yuskavage uses the accumulated vocabulary of her career—figuration, sensuality, color, illusion, humor, abstraction, and art-historical memory—to construct new visual situations.

The exhibition’s paintings repeatedly return to the act of painting itself. A blank canvas becomes a possibility. A completed picture becomes a memory. A remembered image becomes material. A color exercise becomes an artwork.

And the studio becomes something larger than a room.

It becomes a mind in motion.

A Self-Portrait Without a Single Face

That may ultimately be the most revealing way to understand Yuskavage’s new paintings.

The artist does not need to place herself physically at the center of every composition for the work to function as a form of self-portraiture. Her presence is distributed throughout the images—in the recurring canvases, remembered motifs, color systems, studio architecture, and transformations of her own earlier work.

David Zwirner’s 2026 presentation therefore represented a significant moment in an already long relationship between artist and gallery, while also extending Yuskavage’s broader inquiry into how images are born, remembered, transformed, and seen. The gallery describes the exhibition as a synthesis of themes that have shaped her practice from the beginning, but its energy comes from refusing to leave those themes in the past.

In Yuskavage’s world, an old image is never entirely finished.

It can return as a memory, a painting, a fragment, a color field—or the beginning of something entirely new.