Some artists approach art history as sacred territory, treading with care, while others roam through it with voracious freedom, exploring its hidden corners to unearth unexpected brilliance. Flora Yukhnovich belongs to this second lineage: one that fears neither profusion nor excess, and that knows that between the baroque folds of the past still lies the possibility of an intense present, saturated with color and emotion. What she extracts from bygone centuries, she never reproduces; she sets it in motion, she disturbs it, she liberates it.
In "Bacchanalia," her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Yukhnovich chose to tackle a myth as old as the festivals she celebrates: the bacchanalia, its fury, its excesses, its intoxication. She doesn't paint the festival itself; she illustrates the moment it escalates, when outlines crumble, when voluptuousness begins to tremble. Her canvases are vast expanses of color rising like sensory tides. Nothing is fixed; everything floats, migrates, disappears, and returns. The eye seeks a center, but the painting constantly shifts it, like music too vibrant to be confined to a single note.
In Party in the USA (2025), it begins with a familiar figure: the "Torch Lady" from the Columbia Pictures logo. But it retains only a breath, a faded glimmer, the ghost of a symbol that has become too visible to still signify. In its place, the canvas expands into baroque clouds, golden bursts, and flows of pastel where the spectacular is consumed. The Cinemascope format remains as a discreet nod to the power of the images that govern us, but Yukhnovich seems to suggest that even the most solid icons can liquefy under the influx of desire and matter.
Her method of composition is itself a ritual. Before each canvas, she assembles fragments of images on large panels: a drapery by François Boucher, an oversaturated photograph, an almost kitschy advertisement, a detail from a Baroque painting. It is not a process of quotation, but of fermentation. These images macerate together, lose their outlines, then are reborn in a new form when the brush takes hold of them. In the finished painting, nothing is recognizable, yet everything resonates: as if the memory of art were dissolving into sensations.
Excess is her language. Overflowing, her rhythm. In "Bacchanalia," she revisits the figure of Heliogabalus, the young Roman emperor who supposedly buried his guests under mountains of rose petals. Not to illustrate a scene from the past, but to extract its essence: beauty on the verge of suffocation, elegance threatening to collapse into chaos. She also thinks of Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a sumptuous painting painted by himself in an assumed excess – thousands of roses delivered specially from France to give substance to his vision.
Yukhnovich contemplates these stories with a tender detachment. What interests him is not the legend itself, but what, in the overabundance of motifs, makes their meaning waver: when repetition empties the symbol, when what was meant to embody order begins to unravel. His paintings capture precisely this tipping point. They do not depict excess: they are the experience of it itself, a wave that sweeps the gaze away, seduces it, loses it, and then abandons it before a beauty in the process of dissolving.
This exhibition marks a pivotal moment in her career, coinciding with her presentation of "Four Seasons" at the Frick Collection in New York, in close dialogue with François Boucher. Flora Yukhnovich thus continues her unique engagement with history: not as an inheritance, but as a living, shifting material, always ready to be reinvented. In "Bacchanalia," she demonstrates that painting can still be a source of intoxication, energy, and revelation, and that at the heart of the turmoil, something continues to resonate—fragile, sumptuous, untamed.
“Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia”
Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles
901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles (United States)
Until January 18, 2026
