Flora Yukhnovich’s Bacchanalia captures the ephemerality of a revelrous ecstatic dance spinning towards its limits. Tipping into abstraction, bodies dissipate into the landscape in a rapture of fleshy pinks, deep purples and natural greens and browns beneath a darkening mauve sky. Speaking to the present moment of hyper-stimulation, Yuhknovich uses a wide variety of inspirations including past depictions of festivities devoted to the Roman god of wine-making, fertility, ritual madness, religious ecstasy and theatre.
To echo the release of control into mania in terms the painting process, Yukhnovich creates an illusionary space, structuring a landscape and making figurative anchors—inspired by Early Modern and Baroque references—which then collapse into sensation, forms melding into one another. The artist begins from deliberate measured choices before leaping into a more abstract painterly frenzy. The immersive whirl of Yukhnovich’s oval-composed painting represents a moment on the cusp, a dizzying frenzy that cannot last.
About the artist
Flora Yukhnovich’s art boldly explores materiality and process as vehicles for meaning, with cascading and swirling forms evoking rhythm and energy to flow between representation and abstraction. She has attracted critical admiration for immersive paintings in which glimpses of art historical styles, from French rococo and Italian baroque to abstract expressionism, are spliced with references drawn from contemporary films, music, literary sources and consumer culture.
Artwork images © Flora Yukhnovich. Photo: Jack Hems
Portrait © Flora Yukhnovich. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Victoria Miro. Photo: Eva Herzog