6/9/24
Interview with Flora Yukhnovich
Flora Yukhnovich (b1990, Norwich) is a force to be reckoned with. Eager to learn and develop her practice, she approaches each new project or commission as a capsule of opportunity in which to challenge herself, and she has been rewarded by being taken on by two of the most esteemed galleries, Victoria Miro (in 2021) and Hauser & Wirth (in 2023). She has work in the Government Art Collection in London, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Initially training as a portrait painter at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, Yukhnovich began painting in her more recognisable style of today while undertaking an MA at City & Guilds in 2017.
Although seemingly abstract on the surface, the many layers in Yukhnovich’s work collage together inspirations from the rococo period through to contemporary books and films, frequently taking the (female) body as a starting point. She has honed her palette over the years, and she loves to work on a very large scale.
If you visit London’s Wallace Collection, home to one of the world’s finest collections of 18th-century French paintings and decorative arts, before 3 November, you will be able to listen in to the myriad conversations begun by the temporary displacement of two paintings by the French rococo artist François Boucher by two new paintings, made in response to these, by Yukhnovich. Framed in gilt, her works hang at the top of the grand staircase, among the collection’s other pictures by Boucher. His two large paintings, Pastoral with a Bagpipe Player and Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain (both 1749), have been unframed, and they hang, for the duration of this intervention, in the contemporary white-cube gallery on the ground floor, where they confront visitors in a quite unexpected manner.
Studio International met Yukhnovich, who has long visited the Wallace Collection as her motivational gallery of choice, in her final days at her studio in Bermondsey, east London (she is about to move to New York), to discuss this collaboration and her wider practice.
Read the interview here
• Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo is at the Wallace Collection until 3 November 2024.