Discover Flora Yukhnovich’s Energizing Murals at The Frick Collection
The museum lends its Cabinet Gallery to the young British painter for a meditation on the change of seasons and Boucher's famous series on the subject
The Frick Collection’s deputy director and chief curator Xavier F. Salomon met London painter Flora Yukhnovich for the first time at her hometown three years ago. He immediately found himself at the artist’s Bermondsey studio for a visit during which the curator brought up the idea of a collaboration. In a serendipitous turn of events, Salomon received an unexpected text the following week from a colleague, advising him to consider the growingly popular painter for his museum. Now, the Frick’s first commission to a contemporary artist at their recently-transformed early 20th century Beaux-Arts building is on view.
Titled “Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons,” the room-spanning exhibition of powder-hued murals (all 2025) explore the 35-year old artist’s fascination for the Rococo-era painter François Boucher. “Flora is an artist who looks at others’s art very carefully and attentively, especially artists from the past,” Salomon tells Galerie, and he adds that he had noticed many images of Boucher at her studio.
The show in fact shares its title with Boucher’s “Four Seasons” series. The 18th-century French painter’s romantic musings of idyllic figures engulfed in changing seasonal fauna indeed sits in the museum’s permanent collection, steps away from the recently-unveiled Cabinet Gallery where Yukhnovich’s abstracted meditations on the same subject currently dress the walls. This small room was where Boucher’s quartet of paintings were originally exhibited before the museum embarked on the most ambitious renovation and expansion of its history in 2020, helmed by Annabelle Selldorf.
Salomon was already aware of the contemporary painter’s interest in Rococo masters such as Fragonard and Tiepolo who are both represented in his museum’s collection. “I see myself as a facilitator so after seeding the idea, I left Flora free to create her own vision,” says the curator.
Titled per season just like Boucher’s paintings, Yukhnovich’s oil-on-cloth responses meander the oscillating feelings of seasons cyclic transformations on our senses. In an alchemy of floral illustrations and a liquid abstraction, her operatic brushstrokes color both the visible and fleeting impressions of a year’s each period. From the winter’s breezy blues to the spring’s generous pinks and violets, the compositions posses a lyrical, almost melodic, rhythm between colors and nature. The orchestration of four panels in the modest-scale room with dark-toned wood paneling reflects our internal all-encompassing accordance with seasons.
In reflection of long summer days during which the sun remains insistent until late evenings, the painting titled Four Seasons: Summer occupies the room’s widest wall on which flower petals in lush tones energetically jounce. A smaller wall bookended by windows exhibits Four Seasons: Winter in which the artist’s turbulent gestures yield brisk icier shades. Although Yukhnovich’s site-specific response to Boucher resonates with figurative cues, her dramatically orchestrated motifs omit any direct reference. “She walks on a thin line between abstraction and figuration,” adds Salomon who notes that the project marks a first for the institution in terms of hanging heavily abstract painting on their walls. “Experimenting and trying new ideas is important today at the Frick,” he adds.
The collaboration is the latest development in the museum’s efforts to rejuvenate its collection of European painting between 1300 and 1900 by implementing contemporary voices whose practices reflect their own fascinations for Old Masters. During its short stint at Madison Avenue’s storied Breuer Building, the Frick had invited Nicolas Party to respond to Rosalba Carriera’s mid-18th century painting Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume. And, the result in the summer of 2023 was an energetic vignette of the sought-after Swiss painter’s pastel mural backdropping the masterpiece by one of the very few women painters of Italian Rococo.
While Yukhnovich’s murals will grace the Frick’s walls until early spring, she stretches her exploration of art history’s enduring subjects to Los Angeles in late October with the solo exhibition, Bacchanalia, at Hauser & Wirth. On theme with hedonism and indulgence often associated with the City of Angels, the paintings take cues from Hollywood iconography as well as the Roman emperor Heliogabalus who was notorious for his rose petal-washed bacchanals.
“There are certain timeless themes in human life, such as love, death, and passion, and they can be shaped in so many ways,” says Salomon, “the depictions shift in typology but not in their essence.” He notes that seasons will always fascinate artists for what lies in their essence: “they are, in a nutshell, about the passing of time.”
