Flora YukhnovichPeas in a Pod, 2026

Oil on linen

130 x 275 cm

About the artist

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

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