How Flora Yukhnovich Turned Pregnancy into Her Most Personal Exhibition Yet

For her latest exhibition, “Egg,” on view at Victoria Miro Venice, Flora Yukhnovich approaches painting as a way of working through experience in real time. Conceived during the early stages of pregnancy, the show draws from a wide range of creation stories—mythological, biblical, and drawn from popular culture—tracing how these narratives shape expectations around the body, often without capturing its reality. What emerges is a body of work that feels both intimate and expansive, where forms shift, dissolve, and reappear across paintings and a site-specific wall installation that transforms the gallery into a kind of immersive vessel.

Working on a smaller scale than recent projects, Flora Yukhnovich embraced the constraints of Venice as an opportunity to turn inward, allowing imagery to seep and spread across unprimed surfaces in a more fluid, less controlled way. The result builds on a practice that moves between art history and lived experience, something she has explored in recent institutional projects—from her dialogue with François Boucher at the Wallace Collection to her large-scale mural at the Frick. Across each, painting becomes less about fixed meaning and more about following a process as it unfolds.

Flora Yukhnovich on the Origins of “Egg”

WHITEWALL: Your exhibition “Egg” in Venice begins with storytelling—myths, fairy tales, and ideas of creation. What was the starting point for the show? What drew you to those narratives right now?

FLORA YUKHNOVICH: I started work on this show at the beginning of my pregnancy. I felt so disoriented and at the mercy of my body. I began to use the work to try to understand what was happening.

Very quickly, I became aware of just how many narratives surround pregnancy. They are often beautiful and strange but rarely capture its actual strangeness. That gap became the subject of the show. I looked at stories of birth and creation across myth, biblical text, fairy tale, and contemporary culture—many from childhood, which resurfaced with new intensity.

I began looking at tales of vegetal birth—people growing from plants or emerging from flowers, as in Thumbelina; stories of seeds being planted or ingested; or figures like Ilmatar, impregnated by the wind and the sea, which echoes the biblical idea of breath giving life. Alongside that, more familiar or darker images, like storks delivering babies, to the parasitic invasions of Alien and Rosemary’s Baby. There are so many versions of conception, and I was struck by how asexual and ‘un-bodily’ most are. These stories shape how pregnancy is understood from the outside; they don’t attempt to describe the experience itself. 

“There are so many versions of conception, and I was struck by how asexual and ‘un-bodily’ most are,”

-Flora Yukhnovich.

WW: The show includes a site-specific wall painting that the other works respond to. Can you tell us about that piece and the dialogue it inspired?

FY: “Egg” is the title of the show. An egg is mundane, small—even in the shape of the word. But it’s symbolically loaded, full of ideas about the cosmos and creation. The wall painting became a place to play with that contrast. I wanted to turn the gallery into an immersive, egg-like vessel. 

The wall painting contains repeats and mirror images that nod to flock wallpaper, but these elements are several feet tall, so the viewer might feel as if they’d been shrunk and plopped into an illustration. 

I also liked the idea of something happening just beyond the walls. Storks, babies, chicks, fish, plants, and fragments of bodies flickering across the surface, like shadow puppets. In places, they form legible silhouettes, but elsewhere they dissolve back into more organic Color Fields. It’s as if mould or moss is leaching into the space from the outside lagoon. It felt important that the space remains distinctly interior—that the viewer feels the presence of the walls, the shell.

Venice as Catalyst

WW: How do you imagine visitors moving through the space?

FY: I hope it feels surprising to enter the space, maybe even slightly overwhelming at first. Then the walls and paintings begin to settle; shapes start to emerge with just enough discernible imagery to suggest the viewer might unearth a coherent story, to invite them to search for it.

WW: There’s a rhythm across the works in “Egg,” with forms repeating and evolving from one painting to the next. How do you see the works relating to each other?

FY: I usually work across the full set of paintings in a show all at once. It’s important that they relate to each other, and that they each feel vital to the group.

Colour is one way of binding them. I worked mostly in blues and greens, avoiding pinks and reds, which felt too bodily. I wanted any figuration to feel flat and illustrative, not corporeal. The cooler palette, partly inspired by illustrators like Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac, feels more like air or water, or interior states. 

I also wanted to experiment with line, drawing on Art Nouveau, fairy-tale illustration, and tapestries. I usually prioritise colour over line, as line can imply a more structured, sequential way of reading an image. In these works, however, I wanted to introduce that idea of sequence or narrative. This appears in the use of arches as framing devices, and in details such as the “Once upon a time” text in Groweth Seeds and Bloweth Mead, taken from a fairy-tale frontispiece.

I wanted to capture something of an illustrative language—not creating a specific narrative but exploring the aesthetic of it—what range of readings might that prompt in the viewer? 

“I wanted to introduce that idea of sequence or narrative,”

-Flora Yukhnovich.

WW: Can you tell us about what it was like to work on a show specifically for Venice?

FY: The gallery space is small, which was a gear shift for me. For a while, I have been playing with spectacle and theatricality in large paintings. This was an opportunity to turn inward and make a more intimate-feeling exhibition. 

Venice itself felt somehow aligned with the idea of free-flowing imagery and an exchange of storytelling, morphing across time and cultures. 

The idea of water—of damp and seepage—became exaggerated. Some of the works in the show are on unprimed linen, which was a new surface for me—it felt right to have the images almost spill through the surface, pigment spreading capillary-like, rather than muscular, directional mark-making, as if the images are writing themselves.

The Movement of Paint

WW: Your paintings often feel like they’re in motion—forms shifting, almost mid-transformation. How do you think about movement in your work?

FY: It’s really key to the work. It is flux: forms appearing and dissolving. Images come forward and recede as you look, as if the painting is animating over time. But movement is also important in terms of mark-making and directing the viewer’s eye around; it’s about creating different moments of pace, places for the eye to rest, and passageways between. 

WW: You’ve talked about the gap between concept and the physical act of painting. When you’re in the studio, which one tends to lead?

FY: It depends. The concept is obviously important—I need something to chase. But it can be displaced by the painting process itself; an accidental detail will sometimes redirect the whole work. Ideally, the two are hand in glove in the final experience. Being able to compartmentalise during the making process is part of the pleasure of painting.

Flora Yukhnovich Painting Through Time

WW: Your work often pulls from art history but never feels nostalgic. When you were working with François Boucher at the Wallace Collection, what surprised you most about that dialogue?

FY: The idea of nostalgia in relation to Boucher’s work is very relevant. His pastorals present an arcadian, close-to-nature ideal. But they are clearly fantasies—an escape from a suffocating, highly performative court culture. A longing for a past that never existed.

That felt so relatable. There’s a similar impulse to escape the pressures of contemporary life through homesteading, tradwives, rewilding, and both moments present us with a completely artificial, staged ideal, be that Ballerina Farm or Marie Antoinette’s hamlet. And that’s what Boucher gives us—paintings of plays with characters in costumes, and nature lit like stage sets. They are nostalgic, but they don’t attempt to show anything real. It’s a gorgeous, unabashed simulacrum. For me, that felt incredibly contemporary. 

“I’m not trying to preserve or revere anything; I’m still mostly interested in the present,”

-Flora Yukhnovich.

WW: At the Frick, you took over the walls with “Four Seasons.” How did working at that scale—and in such a specific historic space—impact your process?

FY: Yes, the scale was very interesting. The panels were some of the largest I’ve made, but the Cabinet Gallery is relatively small, so the work is encountered at very close range. The painting process became about huge swathes of colour punctuated by small vignettes of painterly play and figurative elements that appear with closer looking. 

Making work to show in a historic building like the Frick makes me work harder to find a useful dialogue between old and new. In a neutral space, the work can sit comfortably in its own anachronism, but here the architecture is already so loaded. So my palette became more synthetic; I used flatter, more graphic elements—building and collapsing space, bringing it closer to a digital image-making aesthetic. 

WW: Across Venice, the Wallace Collection, and the Frick, you’re constantly in conversation with the past. What keeps that exchange feeling alive rather than fixed?

FY: The visual languages we use now are built through art history. I’m looking back to understand how they actually work. I’m not trying to preserve or revere anything; I’m still mostly interested in the present, and my own experiences of the world.