An Abstraction of Bacchanalia in Flora Yukhnovich’s Paintings

Flora Yukhnovich addresses this excess with her latest paintings at Hauser and Wirth’s LA show, Bacchanalia. Swirling layers of bright pinks, violets, and soft blues, her colors feel fleshy, wet, slippery, and plump. Seen from a distance, FEVER PITCH, 7 1/2 x 12 ½ feet, is a spectacle of color and form. The energetic brush strokes are richly alive, dancing with movement. You might see a flying naked body, floating white columns, roses. The grand DON’T JUST STARE AT IT, EAT IT makes you want to do just that – feast and never stop feasting. Try taking in TARANTELLA in one glance. Like the Italian folk dance which it is named after, the painting flirts and seduces you to come closer. The watery colors and rolling cloud-forms open out into a serene center with distant mountains and the sea. 

The LA South Gallery is a perfect stage for this work. Once an old flour mill, the space is vast, with white columns down the center, high ceilings, skylight, and large side windows. Natural light spills across the old cracked tile and concrete floor and onto the pure white walls. The large paintings are hung one foot from the floor so you can walk into them, consumed by the luminous color, the floating colliding forms. The work explodes, not as a violent volcano, but a soft billowing, cascading all over the canvas.

Before beginning this series of paintings, Yukhnovich gathered source material. She said the images are place holders for tone, feeling, color palette. She constructs a “mood board” in her large studio with photos from Disney films, 18th century Rococo paintings of Fragonard, Bouchard, Tiepolo, 16th century Dutch still lifes with towering displays of ripe juicy fruit, fish, and fowl close to decay, de Kooning paintings, and the films The Great Beauty and Heracles, both spectacles of hedonism. Her titles are sign posts for the viewer. PARTY IN THE U.S.A. references Columbia Pictures iconic image, “Torch Lady,” whetting our cinematic expectations. In LUNCHEON, two women with insatiable appetites look down upon tumbling forms of color.

Yukhnovich said she’s interested in taste, “especially bad taste,” like Rococo, which was considered not refined, merely decorative. Her paintings are steeped in historical and contemporary references. The ground color she starts with is either yellow for the historical look, or violet, echoing the screen, the digital. She started as a portrait painter and uses the same palette of six colors which she mixes as she goes along. Her paintings are flat, gesturing at impasto. Close up, you are amazed how thinned out the oil paint really is. THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO is based on the film of the same name with the feel of strobe lights and a disco ball. She’s not afraid of going over the top. 

In the catalogue, Yukhnovich writes, “It is said that Elagabalus was a young Roman emperor who drowned his guests in petals…literally suffocated…killed his guests with decadence. When Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888), he had thousands of roses shipped to him from France…an act of excess.” 

The catalogue is published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers and designed by Damien Saatdjian, with text by Yukhnovich and an intelligent, exciting essay by Eleanor Nairne. In the book, there are no white spaces. Using different textures, the essay’s paper references vellum, the closeups of the paintings are glossy, collaged with images of her studio mood boards. The catalogue is a work of art, loaded with color, photographs of her studio in process, as well as excellent reproductions of each painting in the show.

There is also Yukhnovich’s site-specific mural painting now on view at the Frick Collection in New York. In the series, Diptych, the Frick invites artists to make work based on one of their permanent museum paintings. Yukhnovich chose François Boucher’s Four Seasons series. Her huge painting is set in a small, intimate space– the museum’s Cabinet– where you can step into the work like wallpaper. A catalogue is forthcoming.

Born in 1990 in Norwich, UK, Yukhnovich completed her MA at City & Guilds of London Art School in 2017. Her work is held at the Brooklyn Museum, Hirshhorn Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Government Art Collection in the UK, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Bacchanalia is showing at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles South Gallery, through January 18, 2026.

Flora Yuknovich’s Four Seasons is showing at The Frick Collection in New York, through March 9, 2026.