Flora Yukhnovich
Photo: courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro
Flora Yukhnovich
England born 1990
Level 2
NGV International
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PROJECT
A Taste of a Poison Paradise takes its name from the 2003 Britney Spears’s song Toxic and draws inspiration from Dutch still-life paintings. The painting’s explosion of petals is built up with layers of loose, nearly transparent brushstrokes applied over a period of several months. The effect is something between abstraction and figuration; a flower captured not in its perfect blooming, but in flux, suspended in the airless moment between two breaths. Yukhnovich’s choice of flower painting as a subject matter and pop culture as a filter is deliberate. Both have historically been coded ‘feminine’ and, it follows, regarded as frivolous and low brow. Yukhnovich’s critical exploration of these subjects is a radical attempt to treat seriously culture previously deemed inconsequential. The work is surrounded by historical still-life and flower paintings from the NGV Collection.
ABOUT
Flora Yukhnovich was born in 1990 and completed her MA at the City & Guilds of London Art School in 2017. She has exhibited at Brocket, London; Parafin, London; GASK, Czech Republic; the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings; and at Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University. Previous solo exhibitions with Victoria Miro include Thirst Trap, 2022, and The Venice Paintings and Barcarole, 2020. Collections include the British Government Art Collection and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Yukhnovich’s work featured in the survey exhibition Impressionism: A World View, 2022, at the Nassau County Museum of Art, New York.
Purchased with funds donated by July Cao, 2023