Yuskavage’s women, often exaggerated, hyper-feminine and explicitly sexual, appear initially to cater to traditional male fantasies, but she deliberately complicates that reading. Her women are autonomous, self-aware and confrontational, turning the viewer into a participant in an ambiguous psychological drama. By leaning into and miming the tropes of pin-up art and softcore imagery, Yuskavage constantly critiques the conventions she references.

Rather than harnessing eroticism for titillation, Yuskavage uses it to access vulnerability, power and alienation. Her characters are frequently isolated in surreal, dreamlike landscapes, giving their eroticism a strange, melancholic, even grotesque quality. The sexual charge becomes part of a larger exploration of emotional intensity.

Some critics see her work as a feminist reappropriation of erotic imagery. By painting women with exaggerated sexuality from a woman’s perspective, she reclaims a space for female desire, fantasy and ambiguity. The figures exude agency, subjects in their own right, sometimes even complicit in their objectification.

Eroticism in Yuskavage’s work is never straightforward; it is entwined with discomfort, contradiction and layered meanings. The viewer is drawn in by her beauty and sensuality, and at the same time left questioning their own reactions and assumptions.

The paintings are shown her in chronological order, from early work like the 1991 ‘Bad Babies’ series, through her ‘Northview’ and ‘Hippies’, to her recent large-scale paintings showing naked women ‘models’ congregating in surrealist ‘studios’.