Flora Yukhnovich's Site-Specific “Four Seasons” Series at The Frick Collection

Since The Frick Collection reopened to the public this April, after a five-year renovation and expansion, the museum has continued to garner attention for additional features (such as Westmoreland, the first café within its Gilded Age walls), programs, and exhibitions—including the site-specific Four Seasons series by British painter Flora Yukhnovich. Dressing the walls of the Frick’s reimagined Cabinet Gallery, the four works respond to four from the museum’s holdings, The Four Seasons by François Boucher. Drawing upon French Rococo, Italian Baroque, and Abstract Expressionism, Yukhnovich’s murals engulf attendees with color and a sense of kinetic energy.

The commission was led by Xavier F. Salomon, both The Frick’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator (since 2014) and Deputy Director (since 2020). Salomon will depart The Frick this November to become Director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal; Dr. Aimee Ng will assume the role. Salomon, an influential force in the museum’s advancement, also wrote the text for “The Frick Collection: The Historic Interiors,” out now.

Salomon had a vision for contemporary art interventions throughout the Frick. “Contemporary art, for a very long time, didn’t have a place at the Frick,” Salomon tells Surface.  “And people are still surprised to see contemporary art there. But, in fact, I think we need to start from the point that Frick himself, when he started collecting art, as a youngish man, collected contemporary art. It was all contemporary art at the time, which then developed into collecting more Old Masters.”

Salomon increased contemporary art programming while the institution found a home in the Frick Madison. “The point for us is not to do contemporary art for contemporary art’s sake,” he says. “In New York, you have MoMA, you have the Whitney, you have the New Museum, you have the Guggenheim. But what we can do that those museums cannot do is have dialogues between Old Masters and contemporary artists.”

With Frick Madison, artists including Nicolas Party, Doron Langberg, Salmaan Toor, and Jenna Gribbon found themselves in dialogue with Old Masters. “What is new about Flora is that this is the first time we’re doing something abstract,” Salomon says. “All the other artists we showcased before were figurative artists.”

“What I find fascinating about her paintings is that they tread this thin line between abstraction and figuration,” Salomon explains of the works’ allure. “Generally speaking, they are abstract paintings—but the more you look at them, the more you realize there are figurative aspects in them. And as you identify those figurative aspects, then you start to wonder, is it really figurative? What is that? Am I seeing that? Is that really there?”

Salomon weaves a deeper connection between Yukhnovich’s work and 18th-century French art. “She’s someone who has looked carefully at Boucher and Fragonard, and also Venetian artists like Tiepolo. It’s sort of like a 21st century abstract response to those artists,” he says, “and in the same way that you start seeing figuration in her works, the more you look at it, if you start looking afterward at 18th century French paintings, you start to see abstraction in there.” Yukhnovich antagonizes the dialogue.

Originally, the Cabinet Gallery housed a butler’s pantry and bathroom. The Frick turned this space into the Boucher Room in 1935 so that more people could engage with it. “We decided to change this again with the 2025 expansion and restoration,” Salomon says. “The Boucher Room is back on the second floor, where it used to be. But of course, then we had the empty space downstairs and we had no intention of turning that back into a butler’s pantry. We decided to make it into a neutral space, where we can have temporary displays, either from the permanent collection or with contemporary artists.”

This lends additional meaning to Yukhnovich’s installation. “It’s really an homage to Boucher at the Frick,” Salomon says. “These are responses to the ‘Four Seasons,’ in terms of the subject, but also to Boucher in terms of using a space that was once dedicated to his works.” Salomon says the true conversations after having seen one series, gone to the other, and then returned to either Boucher or Yukhnovich’s pieces for one final assessment.

The project originated with a studio visit in London, and an invitation to engage with the Frick’s paintings to provoke contemplation. “We are lucky to live in a generation where there are these incredibly talented young artists who are looking voraciously at the past,” Salomon concludes. “When we ask questions about the role of Old Masters today, this is part of it. There’s a generation inspired by it.”