By mixing the rococo with the ridiculous, 32-year-old Flora Yukhnovich’s paintings now sell for millions
The auctioneer clutched the Sotheby’s lectern, rocking his sharp-suited body to some silent beat. “And lot number four is the Flora Yukhnovich, I’ll Have What She’s Having, this wonderful painting,” he announced, “lot of interest in the picture, wonderful thing here.” The wonderful thing, a tousle of baby blue spiked with millennial pink, duly appeared on the screen beside him. “And I want to start the bidding here at £40,000… 40,000… 50,000… 60,000 now… 70,000.” The congregation yipped as he jerked his arms around. “At 180… now 200,000.”After a few minutes, the numbers had gone interstellar. “Give me 600,000 please… give me a million,” he cajoled. “At one-million-three – this fabulous picture – £1,600,000 – difficult pictures to find – £1,800,000 – new artist record, of course… I’m selling it here, at £1,850,000, the hammer is coming up here.” The gavel came down as breezy applause broke out. The mood at Sotheby’s London that October evening in 2021 was, as ever, serene insouciance.Twenty months later, Flora Yukhnovich – lean, red-haired, and 32 years old – is in her sun-filled Bermondsey studio, on the site of a Victorian former biscuit factory. A decade ago, she was a portrait painter, toiling away in obscurity. Now, her woozy semi-abstractions regularly fetch millions at auction; one of her candy-coloured numbers – placed in the Government Art Collection – was spotted hanging in the Downing Street residence of Rishi Sunak while he was chancellor. Not that she’s particularly troubled by any of this, she insists.”There are certain elements that feel really surreal. But every day, I come in here, and I’m by myself all day,” she says carefully. “There are times when it feels like a loud noise. But mostly, I just try and keep it as quiet as possible, because all those things, especially in the market, are not in my control.” What must it feel like, though, to have painted something that expensive? “Mmmm.” Yukhnovich pauses. “That painting is not any different from how it was, and I don’t feel differently about it,” she says. “It’s unhelpful to think about.”
Yukhnovich makes paintings of paintings, foraging from the Old Masters, and then presenting back their essential patterns and cues, as if scrambled by an algorithm. While researching for her new exhibition, at the Ashmolean, in Oxford, she spent a week wandering the museum “to see what would leave an impression”. In a dense salon-style gallery of Dutch Golden Age still lifes, she found “not just a painting, but a whole theme, a whole genre”.There was something unsettling about these 17th-century flowers, she thought, so “dark and ominous” that they almost looked like they were “weeping”. Jan Weenix’s carnations are already on the turn; the petals droop in deep shadow. Rachel Ruysch’s rosy blooms illuminate a mossy forest floor, but here, too, the light within them is dying.Even after she’d left the museum, Yukhnovich couldn’t stop seeing their “beautiful crispy leaves”, and the insects and snakes couched in the undergrowth. “I began thinking about decay,” she says. “I wanted paintings that were coming into being, and paintings coming out of being.”Yukhnovich leads me across the studio, skirting two peach-pink paintings-in-progress (“Just the start of something,” she says briskly), to show me a mood board, on which she’s pasted photos of bruised limbs, baked beans and something that resembles a close-up of drooling gums – “so beautiful, so gross” – like a criminal detective’s murder map. “I find it the most satisfying thing in the world when you can connect something that shouldn’t be connected,” she says, like how “a really nice plum could become something like keyhole surgery”.
Schlocky gore pops out in the stills she’s pinned up from the “ridiculous and kitsch” horror films she watched as a teenager. Here’s Carrie (1976), the prom queen drenched in pig’s blood; and the dormitory of Suspiria (1977) pulsating in neon-red light. Recently, Yukhnovich found it bizarrely therapeutic to rewatch Teeth (2007), whose plot consists of a high-school girl discovering she’s grown fangs “down there” (“I can’t believe they made this,” she laughs), and Jennifer’s Body (2009) in which a possessed Megan Fox feeds on American football jocks.These tales of “girls reaching puberty and becoming monsters” revealed what she’d been looking for all along. “This is it,” she thought. “It’s not decay. It’s corruption.”Yukhnovich begins by painting small studies, without overthinking things, “you just feel your way through”. Then she photographs these sketches, sometimes painting directly on top of the prints or collaging them in Photoshop, while she works out the pacing of a piece before she commits it to canvas. She prepares colours as she goes; the oils stay wet as she mixes and mashes them on the painting.She wanted her pieces for the Ashmolean to feel like they were “between something which is quite delightful and a still life, but then really gross and a bit terrifying”. She’s taken the juiciness and luminescence of the Dutch floral arrangements – and their suffocating inertia – as well as the “monstrous feminine” plots of her beloved horror films, and zoomed into the foliage, turning “pure things” into “open gaping spaces”. In paintings such as I Might Have Known it Would Be Red (another Carrie reference – Yukhnovich is a sucker for winking titles), she wanted to conjure up ovaries, kidneys, a tongue – all sorts of innards – while keeping a “floral, fruity” mood.
And you can just make out a Venus flytrap in Teeth, its blushing orifice bounded by trumpeting strokes of a particularly ghoulish green. I should say that if there is a monstrous undercurrent to these pictures, it’s not one that manages to unnerve me. But the paintings – done with her typical fat, sticky brushiness – sure look like a lot of fun.