The artist Flora Yukhnovich said she wants her semiabstract paintings to be “destabilizing” for viewers.
But she meant that in the nicest, very British way.
“The idea of seeing something that you immediately recognize, but then you lose your footing continually — that’s what I want to play with,” said Yukhnovich, a Londoner who was working in her temporary Queens studio in July, wearing her red hair pulled back.
Yukhnovich is 34, and she has already made a career as the creator of riffs on old master paintings, and she does it with brushy, layered, evocative bursts of color that suggest, but do not exactly depict, their subjects.
Her work has been sought after at auction, setting a record of $3.6 million for “Warm, Wet ‘N’ Wild” (2020) at Sotheby’s London in 2022, and she is represented by Hauser & Wirth and by Victoria Miro; she has a show at one of Hauser & Wirth’s Los Angeles galleries beginning in October.
Her latest project is an immersive commission by the Frick Collection, “Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons,” a suite of works enveloping the walls of the museum’s first-floor Cabinet Gallery, in effect forming a mural.
The installation — a response to a 1755 series by the 18th-century French painter François Boucher at the Frick, also called “The Four Seasons” — opens Sept. 3 and is on view until March 9, in a rare intervention by a living artist at the Frick mansion.
In one of her in-progress compositions for the project, “Summer,” which was nearby as she spoke, the pinks, whites, greens and blues were combining on the eight-foot-tall, nearly 20-foot-long work to create a fuzzy sense of large flowers against a landscape.
Yukhnovich began painting the works in February, during a planned yearlong stay in New York that began last summer (and which might get extended, she said). She was already savoring the hoped-for effect of that work and the three others taking over a small room at the Frick.
“It will be extremely overwhelming in the space,” Yukhnovich said with a sly smile. That dovetails with her appreciation of what she called the “too muchness” of Boucher and other Rococo painters.
The original Boucher series, hung in a first-floor hallway at the Frick not far from where Yukhnovich’s will be, epitomizes the Rococo devotion to elevated frivolity with a humorous wink.
In Boucher’s “Winter,” young lovers are out for a jaunt in a sleigh and in “Spring,” a youth laces flowers in his lover’s hair as a goat looks on. Come “Summer,” voluptuous bathers idle in a pastoral landscape, and in “Autumn,” a young swain is practically tripping over himself to make a love offering of ripe grapes.
Adding to the original series’ pedigree and appeal is that it was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour, official mistress and adviser to King Louis XV of France.
The Boucher paintings may seem about as far from contemporary life, and contemporary art, as could be. But Yukhnovich sees it differently.
“I do think he’s a great artist, there’s so much that’s fascinating and extraordinarily relevant in those paintings,” Yukhnovich said.
One of those elements, she said, was the “incredibly theatrical, artificial” quality in his works, perhaps not surprising given Boucher’s active career as a theater designer.
When others see something as “a little bit cringe, a little goofy, that lights a curiosity in me,” she added.
Yukhnovich’s installation is the latest in the Frick’s program of inviting living artists respond to the traditional masterpieces the museum owns — a list that has included Olafur Eliasson, Arlene Shechet, Edmund de Waal and Nicolas Party — and the second since the museum opened its extensively revamped building in March. (Vladimir Kanevsky’s floral sculptures are an ongoing intervention in the main galleries.)
“Part of our mission is to show how the past has an impact on the present and the future,” said Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator. (Salomon is leaving this fall to become the director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.)
The museum, he added, “is not a tomb where you bury old things. This is a way to bring the institution alive.”
It is hard to imagine anyone more qualified for the assignment than Yukhnovich. She has been obsessed with Boucher since 2017, when she was working on her master’s degree at City & Guilds of London Art School.
“The more I looked at him, the more interesting he got,” Yukhnovich said.
Not only that, she made two paintings reinterpreting Boucher last year for another old master trove, the Wallace Collection in London, in the show “Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo.”
That exhibition involved a Freaky Friday — style display swap, in which two Bouchers were taken out of their frames and displayed like contemporary paintings, hung on white walls; Yukhnovich’s pair of paintings were tucked into elaborate gilt frames.
Xavier Bray, the Wallace Collection’s director, said that Yukhnovich reacts in a “a visceral, painterly way to Boucher,” adding, “It’s like an opera being reworked and restaged.”
Bray said that if the 18th-century French painter walked in and saw Yukhnovich’s work, “He might think this is how he would paint if he were born in 1988.”
None of Yukhnovich’s “Four Seasons” works attempt to replicate the specific compositions of Boucher’s versions, and she draws inspiration from various sources, including Dutch still lifes.
Her studio was packed with reference images (of paintings, advertisements, wallpapers), as well as tubes of paint and various brushes. When she is working on large-scale paintings, Yukhnovich will sometimes strap a few brushes together, to cover more ground per stroke.
A couple of days before I visited her studio, Yukhnovich had a compositional crisis with “Winter,” a smaller work than her other three seasons. “I had to overhaul it,” she said.
Although it was not finished and would get more detail, the new version of “Winter” had a cool palette of blues and whites that did give it a chilly atmosphere, and she had hung what looked like a haunting pale moon in the sky.
Her work “Autumn” had a legible mushroom in the foreground — so legible that her husband had advised her to dial it back and make it more abstract. (She left it alone.) The scene seemed to be a landscape with depth, and the other natural elements were hard to identify.
Given her semiabstract style, Yukhnovich relies heavily on her color palette to create emotion. Many of her works have a register of pink and magenta that contrasts with deep blues and greens, like warm and cool fronts colliding to create a storm.
Boucher had strong ideas about color, too. “Nature is too green, and badly lit,” he once said. He favored blues, made possible by the early-18th-century creation of the pigment Prussian blue.
Yukhnovich focuses more on pinks, which can bleed into racier magentas. Pink’s traditional association with femininity is one point of interest for her. “Gendering is part of it, and it’s so prevalent in the Rococo period,” she said.
Typically, Yukhnovich works on linen canvas, but for her “Four Seasons,” she was painting on mural cloth.
“It does absorb paint slightly differently,” she said, adding that it was harder to wipe an area of oil away and change course. “It’s a bit more permanent.”
Boucher’s original “Four Seasons” have unusually shaped canvases with curves at the top because they were likely “overdoors,” said Salomon, a term for works placed above entrances.
Yukhnovich was following suit on a grander scale. Her Frick work, “Spring,” replete with greens that might have given Boucher pause, had two relatively plain areas, because those parts would be cut out to fit around the doorways of the Cabinet Gallery, “just like wallpaper,” she said.
Her sensitivity to aesthetics started early. Yukhnovich, who grew up in Norfolk, England, took to drawing as a child and had already graduated to painting by the age of 14. “It was all I wanted to do,” she said.
She studied portraiture at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London, and then spent a few years painting people as well as dogs. But she got tired of it. “After a while it became uninteresting to paint people looking like people,” she said.
The artist whose work first shifted Yukhnovich’s perspective on painting was not Boucher but Willem de Kooning, whose work she first discovered in art books.
De Kooning taught her about rendering “the experience of living in a body,” she said. “I look at his work all the time.”
Yukhnovich has had a chance to see how her painting “Lipstick, Lip Gloss, Hickeys Too” (2022) stacks up with six works by de Kooning, since both artists are part of a gallery in “Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860—1960,” an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington that includes some pieces by contemporary artists.
Once Yukhnovich was pursuing her master’s degree at City & Guilds, she began to look at the aesthetics of the Rococo era.
On a 2017 visit to the Wallace Collection to look at work by another Rococo master, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, she also spent time looking at the museum’s Bouchers. Upon returning to her studio, she started her first work in response to his, “Boucher’s Flesh,” in which areas of pale pink suggest a group of figures.
As she finished up her own “Four Seasons” for the Frick, Yukhnovich said that the “overdoor” positioning of the original series of the same name has become a useful metaphor for what she wants to achieve.
“The idea of a threshold was a jumping-off point that led me to portal fantasies, like ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland,” she said. “The idea of making a room that was like stepping into a painting is quite appealing.”
Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons
Sept. 3 through March 9, Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan; (212) 288-0700, frick.org.
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