Flora Yukhnovich

Born in 1990, Flora Yukhnovich completed her MA at the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2017. In 2018 she completed The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy.

Flora Yukhnovich is acclaimed for paintings that, fluctuating between abstraction and figuration, draw on painterly traditions ranging from French Rococo and Italian Baroque to seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting and Abstract Expressionism. In her work, Yukhnovich corrals historical styles and references as multiple rhythms and energies in tandem with allusions to mythology, literature, contemporary film, music, or consumer culture.

While titles often offer a pop-cultural entry-point, inherent in Yukhnovich’s painting is an investigation of meaning and materiality, in particular the structures from which gendered readings of subject and process arise. In her paintings drawn from the Rococo tradition, for instance, abstraction is used as a way to resist objectification of the female figure, while her reimagining of floral motifs actively engages with what the artist describes as the ‘moralising and controlling messages’ contained in traditional depictions of flowers and gardens. Yukhnovich presents a more discursive, questioning vision in which forms never quite resolve. Throughout her work, there is a sense of static, idealised beauty tipping into something less contained, more corporeal and compelling.