From imps and goblins to the glitchy digital world: Flora Yukhnovich on her ‘cacophony’ of inspirations

Flora Yukhnovich’s signature large-scale, gestural paintings shot the British artist to fame in the past decade. Riding a wave of popularity for ultra-contemporary painting, her works smashed their auction estimates and sold for millions of pounds. (Her current record was set at Sotheby’s in 2022 at £2.7m.) Yukhnovich, however, prefers not to talk about the market, simply saying “the work is so much more interesting”. And she is not wrong—her sweeping paintings layer references to art-historical movements, from Rococo to Abstract Expressionism, with collages of images taken from a myriad of sources to create fascinating pieces that hover somewhere between abstraction and figuration.

Yukhnovich recently relocated from London to New York. The move has been a long-time dream for the artist, who says the East Coast city has always felt like home (she grew up watching television in the 1990s, when New York seemed to be the only location for shows and films). Her exhibitions in the US this year—a commission at The Frick Collection in New York this month and a solo show at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles next month—have helped to make this dream a reality.

The Art Newspaper: Your works reference great art-historical traditions but there is also an element of the digital in them; they often have the effect of being pixelated or glitchy. Where does this come from?

Flora Yukhnovich: I want to make that connection between something contemporary and something old. Art-historical references are interesting to me because they remind me of something contemporary, and most of the contemporary stuff I see is through my phone or on screens; that’s how I, and how we all, experience the world now. The idea that an advert on Instagram might be drawing on works by [the French Rococo painter François] Boucher is really interesting to me.

I think everyone knows famous works better in the form of a photograph than being in a museum, and that means we’re mostly perceiving things through a screen with a backlight. I think about the kind of filter that that puts on the world. I paint between the canvas, and my iPad and phone, where I do little digital collages. I’ve always loved those documentaries on TV where they do the slow pan across a painting. At night before I go to bed, I’m always looking at my paintings on my phone, just zooming in and obsessing over them.

That feeling of zooming in is really apparent in your work, with small details painted in large format and vice versa.

Exactly. I really like that idea of destabilising the scale in a painting—that you have some sense of perspective, but then it’s sort of glitched. With the collage elements in my work, I do my best to get them to all sit together but I know that they don’t quite. And I think it’s the not-quiteness that makes them feel a bit digital, a bit odd.

You create mood boards before starting a work, which I think contributes to this collage effect in your painting.

Yes, it’s something I’ve always done. I remember as a teenager, I would stick things on my wall and explore how the different clippings made me feel. For my painting it’s like free association; I put loads of images together and then whittle it down to some that feel the most interesting. I find it so intriguing how two different images that are from very different time periods or sources can create some kind of relationship that feels very specific, like there should be an image to bridge the gap in the middle.

For me, the mood boards throw up questions that my paintings can try and answer. I’m always looking for things that could inform the next step in the painting, or the next little motif or fragment that I want to incorporate. I’m always on the lookout; my camera roll is so random.

You previously said that you become obsessed with particular artists and how they create their works. With your recent pieces made for shows at the Wallace Collection in London and the Frick in New York, are you going through a Boucher obsession?

It’s been a long Boucher obsession, but at the moment I’m getting the chance to seriously deep-dive into his work and it’s been a full love affair. The more I learn about him, the more interesting I think he is. I just wish everyone else loved him, too. His work is really smart and self-aware, and I think people often just assume it’s decorative. But I think it’s really about decoration.

Can you describe your commission for The Frick Collection?

I’ve painted wall coverings that respond to Boucher’s Four Seasons (1775). I’ve been working on them for the last six months in the studio and they will be stuck onto the walls of the Cabinet Gallery, above the dado rail, and the door holes will be cut into them. A brocade trim will be fitted round it to make it all look like it’s part of the architecture. Each of the seasons is distinct, but the image will follow the horizon line in the same place and the scale is consistent. I hope it will feel like a panoramic view.

What was on your mood board for this piece?

The Four Seasons paintings were originally overdoors—panels set into the architecture—so I began thinking about looking up at them as you walk through the doors. It’s like passing into a totally different realm. So, then I was looking at portal fantasies, [stories] like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and also The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), with the idea that a wallpaper could encroach on your space. That’s when I decided to make a wallpaper for the Frick, and to think about illusion and making something so all encompassing that it feels a bit claustrophobic.

I began researching panoramic wallpapers, looking at [the French wallpaper manufacturers] Zuber & Cie and De Gournay. I’ve also looked at Victorian fairy paintings and at imps and goblins to try and bring in the idea of fantasy and escape. There are obviously lots of pastoral motifs, too, inspired by Boucher. I hope it’s going to be a cacophony of lots of different things that feel almost too much to take in.

With your love for Rococo and now designing wallpaper, could you see yourself expanding into the decorative arts?

Yes, I think so. Working on this project with the Frick has made me feel like I want to start thinking about environments and how to build a more immersive space to look at paintings in—how the paintings could maybe speak to other parts of the room, like sculptural elements, benches, wall coverings and so on.

Have you tried your hand at other crafts?

No, but I’d like to. I got quite into bedazzling, where you stick tiny rhinestones onto pictures. I’ve ordered historical paintings to bedazzle…

The other paintings you’ve been working on this year are for a show at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. What can we expect?

There are going to be between eight and ten large-scale paintings. It’s such a big space; it’s an opportunity to just go wild. The show has been fed by the idea of doom scrolling and our digital descent into chaos—the experience of being absolutely surrounded and bombarded by imagery and feeling like you have to keep up with everything, because it’s all changing so fast. This made me think of Bacchanalia [the Greco-Roman festivals of Bacchus or Dionysus, the god of wine, known for drunken revelry], so I’ve been looking at Roman architecture and Roman decadence as well as a lot at French academic painting and images of Hollywood and advertising.

Is it a strange time to be in America?

Yeah, it has felt like a weird time to arrive. I did a road trip through Mississippi and Louisiana, and then spent some time in Florida, and it’s so different. It was strange; it didn’t feel like travelling within the same country. You go two hours outside of New York, and you’re in the mountains—it’s wild. You go two hours out of London and you’re in Surrey…

How are you finding New York?

I love it; there’s so much energy and so much happening. My studio is super quiet, so I get to enjoy both a very peaceful studio as well as the frenetic energy of New York. I’ve been here nearly a year, but it’s flown past.

Do you feel like a year in New York has changed your practice at all?

It’s so hard to say. At the beginning, I wanted to make a big break and create totally different work, but I felt quite unmoored and like I didn’t really recognise anything: my home, my studio. So I think, at least with the first works, they sort of felt like a bit of a refuge in that I was able to pick up a thread of my old life a little bit. It’s going to probably take a little while to see how it’s changed the work. I think the works are slightly more immediate—some of that New York gutsiness.

Biography

Born: 1990 Norwich, UK

Lives and works: New York

Education: 2010 Foundation in art and design, Kingston University, London; 2013 Diploma and post-diploma in portraiture, Heatherley School of Fine Art, London; 2017 MA Fine Art, City & Guilds of London Art School

Key Shows: 2023 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; 2024 The Wallace Collection, London; 2024 Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund, Denmark; 2025 The Frick Collection, New York

Represented by: Hauser & Wirth and Victoria Miro

• Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons, The Frick Collection, New York, 3 September-9 March 2026

• Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, 30 October-25 January 2026