Ordrupgaard presents the acclaimed British artist Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990), in her first museum show outside the United Kingdom, titled Into the Woods. Yukhnovich has been hailed as one of the great new masters of painting, destined to occupy a central place in art history. Using a sensuous visual language that lies between figuration and abstraction, Yukhnovich incorporates historical styles into her work – particularly Rococo. At the same time, she transcends conventional genre boundaries by traversing high culture and popular culture. In this exhibition, Yukhnovich invites her audience into an enchanted forest, reminiscent of the worlds of fantasy. Here the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious dissolves in the encounter with both the goddess Venus and the rap queen Nicki Minaj. The exhibition guides the audience through a forest of references, with the female body as the recurring motif.

The works in the exhibition are based on one of Rococo’s favoured genres, the fête galante, in which aristocrats meet and flirt in forest clearings, as in works by such great French masters of the eighteenth century as Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher. The genre was later revived and reinterpreted in the second half of the nineteenth century by Impressionists like Renoir and Morisot, whose works are prominently represented in Ordrupgaard’s collection.

Into the Woods features a series of new works produced specifically for the occasion. The exhibition will be on view alongside Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies #1; both exhibitions mark the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Impressionism with a contemporary artist’s perspective on this groundbreaking movement as well as on the eighteenth-century art that preceded it.