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Since the Venus of Willendorf's tiny talisman, 30 thousand years of humankind's representing fetishizing and totemizing the maternal. Leading today to Yuskavage's ambrosial hazes. The feast of the Vanitas' balanced by looming overripeness. For Yuskavage this balance to its too-sweetness is made through its subtle representational violence against the women depicted, who in attaining this otherworldly ripeness are subject to subtle deformities, missing arms, noses, butts like egg sacs, breasts manipulated by invisible strings, contorted and culled to the desires of a culture. And Everyone wondering whether Nicki's butt is real, furry porn grown from Saturday cartoons given bodies like overinflated water-balloons, and subsections of violent pornography where the maternal is extracted and policed by the programmatic systems of capitalist production, in bondage and milked called human cow - there is a lot proving our cultural relation to maternal is at least a little fraught, and Yuskavage's paintings are a very tasteful representation of that.
see too: Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon
