Navigating the fertile terrain between abstraction and figuration with vivid painterly imagination, Flora Yukhnovich’s Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner masterfully reconciles the visual language of the Rococo with contemporary cultural references to reflect on the origins of entrenched notions of beauty and femininity, altogether re-negotiating their boundaries. The subject of recent solo exhibitions at Victoria Miro in London (Thirst Trap, March 2022) and Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Art University (Flora Yukhnovich: Fête Galante, February – March 2020), Yukhnovich has become one of the most significant painters working today. She is uniquely capable of satisfying a nostalgia for worlds past while toying with the limits between viewer and artwork. In Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner, wryly named after the most famous line of one of the twentieth century’s most famous films Dirty Dancing, thick impasto oil paint covers the vast canvas, creating an immersive portal into the artist’s world. It is this dynamism of application that affords the viewer the sensation of complete envelopment. Luminous shades of teal, blue, green and fleshy hues of pink, brown and cream coalesce, forming an abstract arcadian scene. Concentrated with light hues, the figures in the lower part of the composition are framed by an array of deeper shades, creating the illusion of sunlight and conjuring the sensation of emerging out of a deep, sun-dappled forest.

Sumptuous and alluring, Yukhnovich’s visceral brushwork reimagines the playful and erotic compositions of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, while passages of vibrant colour evoke the delicate 18th century colour palette of Francois Boucher with a distinctly contemporary eye. Depicting nude figures at impassioned play in parkland settings, her paintings are both tantalisingly figurative and inherently non-representational, cunningly echoing the compositional concerns of more contemporary painters such as Cecily Brown, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler. Slipping in and out of focus, abstract forms populate Yukhnovich’s composition, revealing references to fleshy bodies, and anchoring the suggestive arrangements in a visual vocabulary that is always recognisable from afar, yet entirely indeterminate up close. The confines of form are broken, to centre the artistsic focus on colour and sensation. Saturation, tone and texture underpin the entire composition, the sweeping expanse of lush gestural brushstrokes invites the viewer to become complicit, to actively engage and decipher the dynamic painterly mark-making, which defies precise classification. Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner is an outstanding example of Flora Yukhnovich’s synthesis of contemporary abstraction and the extravagance of the Rococo. Unapologetically euphoric, this painting revels in the joy of paint, conjuring an immersive, transportative experience that evokes pastural idylls and long summer days.