Audio

Flora Yukhnovich's Four Seasons | Audio Tour

Speakers: Flora Yukhnovich and Xavier F. Salomon

Xavier F. Salomon: We are now walking into the Cabinet gallery where this temporary amazing installation is currently on. I'm Xavier Salomon, the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator here at The Frick Collection. And it's a great honor to be here with the artist who painted these wonderful paintings, Flora Yukhnovich. These are the Four Seasons, and as you go around the room, you can work out yourself which season is which. But I can help you by pointing out that the seasons start between the doors you've walked through with Spring, and then to your left is Summer, in front of you, Autumn, and to the right between the two windows, Winter. So Flora, welcome, great to have you in your beautiful room. This is sort of a third period room at the Frick. After the Fragonard Room and the Boucher Room in other parts of the museum, we now have a Flora Yukhnovich room. How did you approach this idea of working on such a huge space?

Flora Yukhnovich: Well, it began with looking at the Boucher paintings of the Four Seasons and looking at the unusual format of the works and thinking about how they would've been set into the architecture. And I started thinking about how I could do the same. And I love the idea that they were possibly overdoors and the idea that they're like portals or thresholds and that you might walk into that space, you might imagine yourself into that space as you passed under it. And I thought it would be interesting to make a whole room that felt like an immersive painting that you could step into. I liked the idea that it was four seasons, so it had four walls. I wanted the Summer wall to be the longest because it's hopeful. And I like the idea of the Winter being the shortest and saying something about the length of the days. And then I also like that Spring was between the two doors, and I think there's a natural kind of upthrust given to that wall by the two doors. And so that's kind of how I laid out the seasons.

Xavier F. Salomon: And I think it's so wonderful to think about works like these that are designed for a specific space, while in fact, all the other works at the Frick were probably originally designed for other places or lived in other places and then in a way, were moved. So this is the one site-specific space that has been created for the Frick for the next six months. Your work is hugely inspired by old masters. Can you talk a little bit about how that has worked for you and the inspiration of works of other artists from the past?

Flora Yukhnovich: I trained as a portrait painter and I knew that I was going to paint. And I guess the idea that paint is naturally referential and always references art history, no matter what you do, the moment you take out a paintbrush and you have a canvas made me think that it was important to be conscious about that and be quite deliberate about what I was referencing. I started looking at the Rococo period about eight years ago because it really reminded me of my childhood. It reminded me of the toys I used to play with and a kind of whimsy that's in Disney films and Barbies and things like that. And I thought there was something so peculiar about that connection between something from the 18th century to my own childhood in the UK. And a lot of my work has been about exploring that relationship.

When I began looking at the Rococo, I went to the Wallace Collection to look at Fragonard's Swing because I'd started a series of paintings looking at that work. And at that point I saw Boucher's pastorals and the amazing Boucher paintings at the staircase there. And he started being one of the main artists that I sort of have in the studio and I reference and I look at. I'm very interested in the way that he mixes artifice and nature and the sort of constant tension between theatricality and realism and between seriousness and play. I feel like there's always a tug-of-war between two apparently opposite things that exist in a very interesting way in Boucher's work. So I found it to be endlessly interesting.

Xavier F. Salomon: Your work is really a very interesting balance between abstraction and figuration, where really you're sort of blurring the lines between those two in a way artificial boundaries. How do you approach that? Especially when you are looking at works of art from the Rococo period, from the French 18th century, which are so over the top. And in a way, the more you look at them, the more they almost become abstract in terms of how they're painted and how they're approached.

Flora Yukhnovich: It's one of the things I find most interesting about those paintings and about the period is the sense of identity in touch, the mark-making. I think they're often very gestural paintings, and once you get close to them, it's some of the most beautiful and fleshy mark-making and paint use that you'll see anywhere. And I was really looking a lot at de Kooning when I started looking at Fragonard's Swing. And that relationship was really interesting to me and it sort of cracked open Fragonard's work for me. So I suppose there's something about thinking about experience through expressive mark-making and how you can step inside a feeling of something. When I'm referencing art history, it's about drawing in these different images and these signs and symbols and trying to build a language that maybe hints at something. And then when I think about the mark-making, it's about expressing how I'm feeling about those things and about trying to take it from a more analytical language in a way towards an experience.

Xavier F. Salomon: Obviously with your paintings covering almost every available space in this room, people will come in to experience these as this extraordinary experience. How do you imagine that?

Flora Yukhnovich: I like the idea that there'll be more than one person in the room and you'll be able to see another figure in front of the landscape. Boucher did a lot of work with the theater, and I like the idea that these could almost work as theatrical backdrops and that in Boucher's Four Seasons, there's always the female figure. And I decided to remove the figure and instead create this sort of portal, and hopefully the viewers feel like they populate it.

Xavier F. Salomon: This gallery, the Cabinet, had a very long and somewhat various life here at the Frick. It started off as a butler's pantry and partly a bathroom. And then in the 1930s it was turned into the Boucher Room, which was moved from upstairs where it was originally in the house so that the public could view it on the first floor. The Boucher Room has been in the space from 1935 until 2020 when we decided to move it back upstairs where it was originally.

So in a way, Flora's homage to Boucher, to the Four Seasons is the perfect project for this space because in a way, we are substituting the Boucher Room that used to be here with a new Boucher Flora Yukhnovich room, which makes us think about what a period room is and how an all-encompassing space envisioned, designed by an artist can work. I think that by spending time in this room and looking at these extraordinary paintings and then walking through the galleries and going back to the French 18th century, to Fragonard and to Boucher, one learns so much about those artists by seeing them through Flora's eyes in this gallery. So I invite you all to spend time in those two other period rooms after you spend some time here. Well, Flora, thank you so much for being with us today, and thank you for this incredible homage to Boucher here at the Frick.

Flora Yukhnovich: Thank you very much, Xavier.