CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/29/2021

Surprising 'Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness' is on view at Baltimore Museum of Art

Beach Fire (2012) is reproduced from Lisa Yuskavage: Wilderness, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. to accompany the exhibition currently on view in Baltimore en route from the Aspen Museum of Art. But why organize a show of landscapes by an artist known for her paintings of female bodies in extremely vulnerable (or available) positions, former Aspen Art Museum Director Heidi Zuckerman asks. Yuskavage's response: "The figures in my works are the actors, and when I pull the camera way, way back, I can see what else is happening.… All of a sudden, there are sunsets, sunrises, mountains, farmlands, and farmers. I was just playing all these things out and letting them run amok. The landscape was more about the inclusion of other things; it was opening up the frame." So while this beautifully produced volume does include conventional landscape paintings, there are also works in which, in Zuckerman's words, "the body itself becomes a landscape, where breasts look like mountains and nether regions like haystacks, and we can speak of Monet or Courbet references."