Flora Yukhnovich's 'Egg' at Victoria Miro Venice: Pregnancy, Myth, and Immersive Painting

Flora Yukhnovich's latest exhibition, 'Egg,' at Victoria Miro Venice, marks a deeply personal turn in her practice, conceived during the early stages of her pregnancy. The show explores the gap between cultural narratives of creation and the lived reality of the body, drawing from mythological, biblical, and popular culture sources. Yukhnovich's new works, painted on a smaller scale than recent projects, embrace the intimate constraints of the Venice gallery space. A site-specific wall painting transforms the gallery into an immersive, egg-like vessel, with motifs of storks, babies, and organic forms flickering across the surface like shadow puppets. The exhibition features works such as 'Peas in a Pod,' 'Groweth Seeds and Bloweth Mead,' 'Four and Twenty Blackbirds,' and 'Ilmatar,' executed in a cooler palette of blues and greens, inspired by illustrators like Kay Nielsen and Edmund Dulac. Yukhnovich experimented with unprimed linen, allowing pigment to spread in a fluid, capillary-like manner. The show also reflects her ongoing dialogue with art history, following her projects at the Wallace Collection with François Boucher and the Frick's 'Four Seasons' mural. In an interview, Yukhnovich discusses how the exhibition allowed her to turn inward, exploring themes of sequence and narrative through line and illustrative language, while maintaining a focus on the present rather than nostalgia.