Flora Yukhnovich, a British artist in her thirties known for her flowing canvases that draw inspiration from the pastel landscapes of Rococo and Baroque paintings, has joined the global mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth. The gallery will represent her in collaboration with Victoria Miro, with whom Yukhnovich had a first solo exhibition in 2020. Her debut with Hauser & Wirth will be a solo exhibition at one of the gallery’s locations in Los Angeles in 2024.
“Flora is an artist with a remarkable creative vision who defines her own language of painting to evoke a fascinating universe,” said Iwan Wirth, president of the gallery, in a press release. “There is an incomparable strength and energy in his work. She explores the history of art while applying conceptual rigor by considering a wide range of cultural references ranging from 18th century painting to the present day.
The Norwich-born, London-based painter studied portraiture at the Heatherley School of Fine Art and, in 2017, earned her MFA at the City & Guilds of London Art School. She had her first solo exhibitions at the Brocket Gallery and Parafin in London. His work combines a very contemporary interest in the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, as well as a fascination for the tactility of painting, with a scholarly devotion to the history of painting.
Flora Yukhnovitch, Pontecello2020 © Flora Yukhnovitch. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Victoria Miro
“For me there is something corporeal in painting and I am interested in how a pictorial gesture can speak to the physical experience of touch in a visceral way, breaking the distance between the viewer and the work” , Yukhnovich said.
Very soon after his first solo exhibitions, his work began to appear on the secondary market, where it regularly fetched sums well in excess of auction house estimates. In October 2021, for example, Sotheby’s offered him the 2020 painting I will have what she has at its Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London, with an estimate of £60,000-£80,000. After a flurry of offers from Asia and the United States, it sold for £2.5 million (including shipping), more than 30 times the high estimate.
Prices in the primary market have risen at a somewhat more measured pace, but in the secondary market his large canvases consistently post seven-figure sums. At Frieze London last year, Victoria Miro sold her 2019 painting Fancy for $2 million after a collector sold it to the gallery. “If it’s secondary, it must be in this ballpark,” Glenn Scott-Wright, partner and gallery director, said at the time.
Flora Yukhnovitch, She is Beauty and She is Grace2022 © Flora Yukhnovitch. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Victoria Miro
Yukhnovich’s paintings that first caught the attention of the art market were inspired by works by rococo painters like François Boucher, Antoine Watt and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. More recent works feature a somewhat darker palette and draw inspiration from the Dutch still lifes of Ambrosius Bosschaert, Clara Peeters and Rachel Ruysch. In new works that will go on display at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford next month, Yukhnovich transforms the rich symbolism of the still life genre into a receptacle for reflections on the female body, sexuality and reproduction, while also referencing depictions of women in film. ‘horror.
“Yukhnovich’s fleshy, visceral, and engulfing pictorial language can be interpreted in relation to a wild side of womanhood, which horror films present in a highly aestheticized and exaggerated form,” wrote art curator Lena Fritsch. modern and contemporary at the Ashmolean. “However, these paintings above all convey Yukhnovich’s strong love for the medium of painting and the creative process of painting.”
