Portfolio
Bulletin:
Flora Yukhnovich
The inspiration board in the artist’s Queens studio
Photo: Dan McMahon
For our latest installment of Bulletin—Ursula’s recurring feature that focuses on artists’ bulletin boards and studio ephemera, the casual image banks they assemble for inspiration—we visited the painter Flora Yukhnovich at her studio in Long Island City, Queens.
Photo: Dan McMahon
“I like to begin a painting by collecting images—pulling things from books, magazines, museums, films, and pinning them up around the studio. I’m looking for a through line, a red thread that connects them all. For me, painting lives in the squishy, imprecise space between images; the familiar feelings that flicker through the fast-thinking mind before logic catches up. Mood boards help me pin down that shadowy feeling before I begin painting. As I work, I stay on the lookout for new images that speak the same language. The boards grow alongside the paintings, evolving with them. Thinking through ideas with images and collage feels important, partly because painting is so difficult. It helps me develop ideas more playfully, then there’s less pressure when I’m directly facing the canvas.”—Yukhnovich
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“Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia” opens at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles on 30 October 2025.
Further reflections on the artist’s research-based practice can be found in the accompanying monograph Flora Yukhnovich: Bacchanalia, available from Hauser & Wirth Publishers in October.
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Flora Yukhnovich’s art flows between representation and abstraction, exploring materiality and process as vehicles for meaning. She has attracted critical admiration for paintings in which glimpses of historical styles, from French Rococo to Abstract Expressionism, are spliced with references drawn from contemporary mediums and consumer culture.