Lisa Yuskavage’s new exhibition at David Zwirner carries the weight and intimacy of a relationship built over time. This is their twelfth exhibition together over the course of twenty years, something that gave the opening dinner an unusual sense of continuity and trust.
Lisa shared that when she first met David and shook his hand, she had a vision of that exact future moment: a dinner decades later surrounded by friends, supporters, collaborators, and community.What was so striking was not the idea of ambition, but of legacy—as though she intuitively understood the shape of a long supportive relationship before it fully unfolded.
Equally moving was the toast given by her husband, the painter Matvey Levenstein. Together for forty-one years, he spoke about the confidence and assurity of these paintings with the perspective of someone who has witnessed a lifetime of work, risk, discipline, and evolution firsthand.
Quoting Milan Kundera, he spoke about praise not as obfuscation, but as a celebration of life and living itself. That observation was deeply connected to the exhibition. Although the paintings depict fictional scenes, they capture something profoundly real about emotional experience—not simply what life looks like, but how it feels to be alive.
What is extraordinary about Lisa and her work is her concentrated effort to achieve emotional precision. The paintings hold sensuality, awkwardness, humor, vulnerability, beauty, and psychological complexity simultaneously, all through a canonical command of paint itself.
Lisa Yuskavage is on view at David Zwirner New York: 533 West 19th Street through June 26, 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM–6 PM.
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