Flora Yukhnovich's Lushest Surfaces Are Made of Thin Paint

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 07, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Flora Yukhnovich's Lushest Surfaces Are Made of Thin Paint At a Glance Flora Yukhnovich's "Egg" in Venice looks like loaded Rococo impasto from across the room. Up close the paint is thin and flat. The lushness is an illusion built with colour and edge, not piled-on material, and that is the hard part. The first thing that reaches you in “Egg” is the colour, before any image resolves. Juliet Art Magazine, reviewing the show this week, calls the roll: “Carnal pinks, toxic greens, milky blues and corrosive yellows dazzle the retina.” That is Flora Yukhnovich’s new exhibition at Victoria Miro in Venice, on view 5 May to 4 July, a body of new painting s made, as the gallery notes, while she was pregnant, with the egg as the show’s governing image: a closed form holding a process mid-change. I want to read past the colour, though, to the thing a painter notices second. Why thin paint that looks like impasto is the hard trick Stand in front of a Yukhnovich from six feet and the surface looks loaded, whipped, all that Fragonard cream. Walk up to it and the paint is thin. Flat, scrubbed, diluted oil sitting close to the weave. The lushness you read from across the room is not on the canvas as material. It is an illusion she builds with value, edge, and colour temperature. That is harder than it sounds, and harder than real impasto. When you actually load paint, the ridges catch raking light for free and the eye reads richness off the physical relief. Yukhnovich gives herself none of that. She has to manufacture the whole sense of plenty optically, with thin paint that has no relief to catch light, which means every bit of that apparent abundance is a decision about where an edge softens and where a value drops. From across the room it looks loaded; up close the paint is thin. The lushness is painted, not piled. For a collector, that changes what is on the wall. A Yukhnovich is not the heavy, armoured surface it photographs as. It is a controlled, fairly delicate skin of thinned oil, and the apparent abandon is the opposite of abandon. What looks like froth is the most disciplined thing in the room. The discipline hiding under the riot The other thing a painter clocks is how the colour never tips into garish, even at this volume. Toxic greens next to carnal pinks should fight and cheapen. They don’t, and the reason is old and unglamorous: she works from a small fixed palette, mixed as she goes, so every loud colour on the canvas shares the same few parents. A limited palette is the quiet engine under the noise. The harmony is built in at the source, before the first mark. She started as a portrait painter, and the training shows underneath the dissolution. The Rococo, and now the Hieronymus Bosch she is reaching for in this show, are pushed right to the edge of abstraction , held at the threshold where the eye still reads flesh, or sky, or a swarming Northern Renaissance world, just as it collapses into paint. She has said