Lisa Yuskavage's grotesque pin-up girls are lurid and luscious. Her paintings depict women with swollen bellies, swinging hips and jumbo-size breasts, rosy cheeks and small cherry mouths. Often depicted falling out of their clothes in the bedroom, or romping in the great, candy-coloured outdoors, these are fantasy femmes who give with every desirable inch, even as their eyes are locked in introspection. They are at once deliciously inviting and at the same time intensely difficult to handle. As overblown sex objects, they seem to play to, yet also cross-examine, society's obsession with female sexuality.
In the past two decades the New York-based Yuskavage has emerged as one of the most provocative painters of her generation. Like her friend and peer John Currin, she does things that artists aren't supposed to do with paint. This has as much to do with her unholy mix of styles as her subject matter. These kitsch exaggerated nudes are realised with the sophistication of Renaissance masters – she cites the great Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini as one of her greatest influences – but the American popular painter Margaret Keane's impossibly cutesy images of saucer-eyed children have left their mark too.
Yuskavage's work wasn't always so brazen. For her New York debut show in 1990, she depicted women who demurely turned away. She now declares these paintings "weak and ashamed", and took a year off before returning with work reinvigorated. Her Bad Baby series from 1991 features semi-naked, doll-faced women timidly emerging from sweaty fuchsia pink, apple green or electric blue surfaces – a riff on colour field painting.
Sometimes Yuskavage's settings are subversively far-out, as with some of her latest paintings where figures in rainbow-striped stocks emerge from a rubble pile like post-apocalyptic Pippi Longstockings. Hinged between mystery and absurdity, they are as funny, freaky and frightening as they are titillating.
Why we like her: In her series of PieFace paintings, Yuskavage's women are painted with their faces covered, ludicrously, in custard pie – but something ferocious seems to lurk beneath.
Roleplay: When Yuskavage first began painting these hyper-sexualised women, she says she imagined a fictional male gaze: Dennis Hopper's character Frank Booth, the gas-inhaling deviant from Blue Velvet.
Where can I see her? At Greengrassi, London, until 29 May 2010.