Victoria Miro is delighted to present Egg, an exhibition by Flora Yukhnovich of new paintings conceived in dialogue with a site-specific wall painting.

The genesis of this exhibition lies in storytelling – myths and fairy tales, with an emphasis on stories detailing fantastical conceptions and births – specifically the ways in which narratives undergo transformation over time. Developing these ideas during her own pregnancy, Yukhnovich was drawn to the underlying ideologies of these creational stories and the ways in which, often, they strive to explain life’s mysteries while failing to account for the far stranger reality of lived experience. For the artist, this notion of concept versus practice finds salient parallels in painting, where the physicality of the painted mark can hold inherent contradictions and uncertainties, by turns precarious or profound, that live beyond simple interpretation. 

In the way that archetypal tales establish enduring narrative frameworks, their recurring dynamics and motifs changed by context as they move through time, the paintings share a number of nascent forms, which rhythmically, like a musical canon, shift registers from painting to painting. These are brought into further conversation by the activated ground of a wall painting created on site, against which the works are installed, while Venice itself, glimpsed through the gallery window, provides an especially poetic context for thoughts of flow and flux, circulation and regeneration.

While expanding her frame of reference – to include identifiably figurative motifs and those that seem drawn from the complex, fantastical world of Northern Renaissance painters such as Hieronymus Bosch – these new paintings are consistent with the artist’s process, at once generative and reflective, moving between intuitive exploration and thoughtful analysis.