Flora Yukhnovich: Egg - Victoria Miro

Introduction

Victoria Miro is delighted to present Egg, an exhibition by Flora Yukhnovich of new paintings conceived in dialogue with a site-specific wall painting.

The genesis of this exhibition lies in storytelling – myths and fairy tales, with an emphasis on stories detailing fantastical conceptions and births – specifically the ways in which narratives undergo transformation over time. Yukhnovich is drawn to the underlying ideologies of these creational stories and the ways in which, often, they strive to explain life’s mysteries while failing to account for the far stranger reality of lived experience. For the artist, this notion of concept versus practice finds salient parallels in painting, where the physicality of the painted mark can hold inherent contradictions and uncertainties, by turns precarious or profound, that live beyond simple interpretation.

In the way that archetypal tales establish enduring narrative frameworks, their recurring dynamics and motifs changed by context as they move through time, the paintings share a number of nascent forms, which rhythmically, like a musical canon, shift registers from painting to painting. These are brought into further conversation by the activated ground of a wall painting created on site, against which the works are installed, while Venice itself, glimpsed through the gallery window, provides an especially poetic context for thoughts of flow and flux, circulation and regeneration.

Editorial

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link Flora Yukhnovich talks to Il Giornale dell’Arte about new solo exhibition, Egg, in Venice

'In a certain sense, the exhibition is about the circulation and mutation of narrative, the way stories reproduce themselves. I also couldn't ignore the parallel between pregnancy and the act of creating a body of work in the studio: both involve a kind of organic growth that remains partly obscure even to those who create it. It's a bit like the story of Pygmalion.'

30 April 2026

Works

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Flora Yukhnovich

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. As Eleanor Nairne comments in a 2022 essay on the artist, 'Yukhnovich finds a way to suspend her paintings in flux, the oil having been worked over a number of days so that even when it's finished there is the feeling of barely perceptible movement - like dust motes swirling in the half light, or milk marbling into a cup of tea.' Throughout her work, there is a sense of static, idealised beauty tipping into something less contained, more corporeal and compelling.

About the Artist

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. Her first solo exhibition was held at Brocket, London, UK, in December 2017 and has exhibited at Parafin, London, UK; GASK, the Gallery of the Central Bohemian Region, Czech Republic; the Jerwood Gallery Hastings, UK and at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University, UK. Solo exhibitions with Victoria Miro include Thirst Trap, 2022, and The Venice Paintings and Barcarole, both held in 2020.

In 2022, work by the artist featured in the survey exhibition Impressionism: A World View, on view at The Nassau County Museum of Art, NY, USA.

In 2023 Yukhnovich was one of the first artists to take part in a new series of solo exhibitions responding to the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK, titled Ashmolean NOW (2023–24). Also in 2023, work by the artist featured in the group exhibition New British Abstraction at CICA Vancouver, Canada; and NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2023–24).

In 2024 (5 June–3 November) with the presentation Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo, paintings by the artist temporarily replaced two works by François Boucher at the top of the grand staircase on the landing of Hertford House conversing with the surrounding historical works in the Wallace Collection, London, UK.

The artist’s first museum exhibition outside the United Kingdom, titled Flora Yukhnovich: Into the Woods, was held at Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund, Denmark (2024–25).

Yukhnovich’s work is in permanent collections including the Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX, USA; Government Art Collection, London, UK; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, USA; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

View artist page