Lisa Yuskavage Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985 2018 at DAVID ZWIRNER

James Kalm slips into Chelsea late on a Tuesday evening, and makes a truncated tour of the Lisa Yuskavage exhibition. “Babie Brood: Small Paintings 1985-2018” presents nearly ninety small paintings that trace the arch of this controversial painter’s themes and subjects. Having arrived on the New York scene with a provocative body of early work, Yuskavage has, over three decades, perused her own branch of erotic/illustration/kitsch that keeps confounding her critics, and enthusing her fans. Using the tropes of men’s magazine cheese-cake, the artist inserts her own images of fecundity, adolescent sexuality, and excess, but always with a masterly facility of her painterly means, and a unflinching, wide eyed female gaze. This program was recorded November 20, 2018.