Born in Norwich, England, Flora Yukhnovich did not have much exposure to fine art as a child. The 35-year-old artist tells Vogue, however, that she was “absolutely obsessed with making.”
“Every time I’ve connected with a new artist or the Old Masters, it’s really been from a painting perspective, because I’m trying to work something out or trying to see how someone else has done it,” says Yukhnovich, who honed her passion for French Rococo, Italian Baroque, and Abstract Expressionist art as an art student. “The material comes first for me.”
Material challenges are also what fuel Yukhnovich, whose studio has been based in Long Island City since August 2024, to push her œuvre to new heights: “It’s not interesting until it feels high-stakes, like it might not work out.” After her 2024 exhibition “Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo” at the Wallace Collection in London, in which she responded to two pastoral scenes by the 18th-century painter, Yukhnovich conceived four breathtaking murals inspired by Boucher for New York’s Frick Collection. Not only is “Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons,” which opened in September and remains on view until March, the artist’s first US solo project, but it also marks a technical breakthrough. For the first time, Yukhnovich made paintings on fabric that was applied directly to the wall, resulting in works that fully immerse viewers in her luminous, fantastical, jewel-toned flurries.
The panoramic murals dress the walls of the Frick’s new Cabinet Gallery, which is dedicated to presenting small-scale displays and contemporary interventions. From 1935–2020, the space was called the Boucher Room after Boucher’s The Arts and Sciences panels displayed there. As part of the museum’s extensive renovation, however, the series was reinstalled on the building’s newly opened second floor, restored to their original location in Adelaide Frick’s boudoir.
Just around the corner from Yukhnovich’s installation, however, is Boucher’s series The Four Seasons, from 1755, which have hung in the same vestibule since Henry Clay Frick purchased them in 1916. Each about 28” wide, the works were initially conceived as “overdoors” (artwork hung above a door and set into the wall) for one of the residences of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV.
Yukhnovich was charmed by the unusual shape of Boucher’s works, as well as the opportunity to “play with the idea of painting and architecture at the same time.”
“I loved that idea of thinking about a threshold or a portal. That got me really excited and thinking about escapism in relation to Boucher’s work,” Yukhnovich says, citing portal fantasies like the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland and the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “I wanted to create something like that, like you’re stepping into the painting.”
Yukhnovich also aspired to channel the creativity and immersion of artist Laura Owens’s recent New York exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery, an expansive showcase of her hand-made books, painting, and sculpture, many of which were mechanized to reveal surprise elements. “It was so clever and playful and funny. I felt like she took every idea to its most extreme conclusion,” says Yukhnovich. “I love that thing where you’re constantly tripped up. You constantly think you know what you’re seeing, but you don’t.”
The same could be said of Yukhnovich’s signature play between figuration and abstraction, which incorporates whimsical Easter eggs, or, as the artist calls them, “visual cues.” In The Four Seasons, for example, bold gestural strokes are interlaced with hints of flattened foliage (mined from an old anthology of wallpaper and fabric prints), plus mythical creatures and toadstools—a product of researching Victorian fairy painters and illustrators, such as Richard Dadd and Arthur Rackham.
“They’re so bonkers…there’s so much to find in them,” says Yukhnovich. “There’s something about this group of grown men retreating into what we think of as quite a sentimental niche as a way of trying to find magic in the world again when the world felt a bit sad and depressing.”
The notion of gender is also connected to the artist’s ongoing interest in “the idea of hierarchy in aesthetics and how we determine value.” Years ago, when considering the undeniable link between Rococo artists’ gestural mark-making with the Abstract Expressionists’, Yukhnovich wondered why the former had become “probably the most dismissed and disregarded part of the canon.”
“I realized that gender was a significant reason that it’s not seen as a serious aesthetic, [and] the Rococo became a vehicle for me to explore this relationship between the way that seriousness and frivolity intersect with gender.”
Excess and abundance serve as the focus of Yukhnovich’s newest exhibition, “Bacchanalia,” her first Los Angeles solo show, as well as her debut presentation with Hauser Wirth (she is also represented by Victoria Miro). On view through January 18, 2026, its new series of large-scale canvases further reveals Yukhnovich’s technical prowess, imagination, and sense of humor as she explores ancient and contemporary hedonism. The artist describes her lengthy research process as opening “a folder in [her] brain,” where wide-ranging imagery sourced from paintings, films, or even the supermarket are filed away. Eventually she distills them down to a mood board in her studio, where she relishes in especially disparate connections. “I find that most entertaining to walk the line between two things that are strongly related, but it’s kind of illogical that they are,” she says.
Key visuals for the vivacious works in “Bacchanalia” include the Gucci Flora perfume campaign in which Miley Cyrus lounges on a lush flowerbed beside the iconic Hollywood sign (Yukhnovich says she’s been gifted the fragrance on nearly every special occasion). The American songstress also inspired the title of a work in the show—Party in the U.S.A.—which additionally reflects Yukhnovich’s appreciation of an unexpected, punchy pop culture reference.
The romantic painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), which depicts the ancient Roman story of a young emperor drowning his banquet guests in rose petals, was another important source. Adding to the decadent painting’s lore, Alma-Tadema allegedly had thousands of roses shipped from France to his London studio when completing the work.
Given their monumental scale (the largest painting is nearly 15 feet wide), it’s easy to feel swept away by Yukhnovich’s explosive compositions, at once dreamlike and dizzying. Yukhnovich says a “central conflict in [her] work” is “a sense of too-muchness, whether that’s too much saturation in the color, too much paint on the surface, or too much kitschiness.”
The question of taste, including her own, is something she is still coming to terms with. “I think people often assume that I am making the work from a place of joy, and that it’s about this escapist experience of surrounding myself with beautiful things in the studio, when I actually find it quite uncomfortable because I find the idea of employing beauty as a tool, or as something to explore in the work, a bit embarrassing and shameful, like it’s a guilty pleasure,” she says. “I find beauty to be provocative and complex, and it makes me feel all kinds of ways that are not simple and joyful.”
At the same time, Yukhnovich finds that very “awkwardness and ambivalence” both “generative” and empowering. “It makes you lean into things in a way that’s almost camp. There’s a defiance to the way that you treat the subject matter,” she says. “When there’s a sense of embarrassment about the subject, I know that I’m in the right space, because sometimes I’ll make work about something for long enough that it becomes neutralized to me. That means I have to move on to something else.”