{"id":2599,"date":"2025-03-27T16:51:23","date_gmt":"2025-03-27T16:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/27\/dont-miss-io-sono-leonor-fini-at-palazzo-reale\/"},"modified":"2025-03-27T16:51:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T16:51:34","slug":"dont-miss-io-sono-leonor-fini-at-palazzo-reale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/27\/dont-miss-io-sono-leonor-fini-at-palazzo-reale\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Miss: \u201cIo sono LEONOR FINI\u201d at Palazzo Reale"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Leonor Fini, Le Bout du Monde<\/em>, 1948; Oil on canvas, 35 x 25 cm. Private Collection \u00a9 Leonor Fini Estate, Paris<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Histrionic, chameleonic and magnetically seductive: these adjectives deftly capture the essence of Leonor Fini<\/a>, whose life played out as an endless masquerade of roles and fantasies. Amid the recent market surge in interest surrounding her work and uniquely idiosyncratic, multidisciplinary practice, Fini is often grouped with Latina Surrealists. Yet, despite being born in Buenos Aires, she was profoundly Italian in her innate sense of drama, in her disarming sensuality, in the mystery of her witch-like figures and in the refined literary and artistic references she drew from the classics\u2014something finally being acknowledged in a major new survey at Palazzo Reale in Milan.<\/p>\n

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Titled \u201cIo sono LEONOR FINI\u201d (\u201cI am LEONOR FINI\u201d) and curated by Tere Arcq and Carlos Mart\u00edn, the Milan exhibition turns its focus inward, centering on Fini herself as the source from which her enigmatic art radiates\u2014an art that continues to captivate collectors and enthusiasts today. Featuring over 100 works across nine thematic sections, the show unpacks how Fini\u2019s unorthodox and magnetic personality, along with her boundless imagination, manifested in a lifelong performance of roles both lived and painted. A quote from Fini herself gives the exhibition its name: \u201cI am a painter. When people ask me how I do it, I reply: \u2018I am,\u2019\u201d which distills the rebellious, independent spirit animating her entire creative trajectory. As Mart\u00edn comments in a video, \u201cShe was fake as she was real\u2014an example of how femininity is so complex that it cannot have a single definition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaping this mercurial persona was also the dramatic tale of her early years, when her Italian mother went to rocambolesque lengths to keep her from being taken back to Trieste by her Argentine father. To thwart his kidnapping attempts\u2014twice\u2014Malvina disguised young Leonor as a boy and changed her name. She was raised in Trieste, steeped in fin du si\u00e8cle decadence and the intellectual circles her mother moved through, all under the lingering shadow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire\u2019s faded grandeur. In 1931, she relocated to Paris and was quickly absorbed into the most vibrant creative circles, befriending Surrealist titans like Andr\u00e9 Breton and Salvador Dal\u00ed and encountering icons such as Christian Dior<\/a> and Jean Cocteau<\/a>. Just two years later, she returned to Milan, collaborated with Achille Funi at the Fifth Triennale, made her exhibition debut at the age of 22 and began showing at Galleria Milano. Around that time, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed her in portraits that hinted at surrealist influence and doubled as declarations of her immersion in the cultural and artistic pulse of the era.<\/p>\n

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Installation view: \u201cIo sono LEONOR FINI\u201d at Palazzo Reale, Milano. Palazzo Reale \/ \u00a9 Leonor Fini Estate, Paris<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fini was engaged with some of the most vital intellectual circles in Paris, Rome and Milan throughout her life. She also immersed herself in the worlds of cinema and theater as a costume and set designer, earning the admiration of legendary figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini<\/a>. She collaborated with great directors, too, including Luchino Visconti<\/a> and Federico Fellini<\/a>\u2014designing the costumes for 8\u00bd<\/i>, though she was never credited for her work.<\/p>\n

With her potent feminine presence, Fini was always a protagonist, never a muse. Her force of personality was so undeniable that Max Ernst<\/a> famously dubbed her the \u201cItalian Fury.\u201d A rare video from Istituto Luce captures her in a characteristically witch-like guise, painting and seducing a man in a seaside tower near Rome, where she lived for a time. The figures she painted echo the mystery of that image\u2014archetypes of wild feminine energy in all its varied incarnations. A recurring motif in Fini\u2019s visual lexicon was the sphinx, a symbol that encapsulated her work and identity: a hybrid, mutant, powerful and mesmerizing creature. It became her signature avatar\u2014an ambiguous being hovering between human and animal, man and woman, divine femininity and demonic presence\u2014threading together myths, civilizations and symbols.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: Observer\u2019s April Art Fair Calendar <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At sixteen, an eye infection left her bandaged in darkness for two months. When her sight finally \u201cawakened,\u201d she committed to pursuing an artistic career\u2014her blindness sharpened her inner vision, a key surrealist theme. Her paintings, rich in symbolic and epic resonance, reveal an alternate order of reality shaped by dreams, hallucinations and heightened states of consciousness. They channel the mystical and metaphorical self, peopled with sphinxes, cat-women and ambiguous men\u2014figures that seem to drift across dimensions, as if Fini herself were merely a vessel for their passage. Masking, dressing and undressing identities became her lifelong performance, both on canvas and off. Fittingly, Jean Genet once accused her of withholding her true self as both a woman and an artist. \u201cYou seem to me on the edge of metamorphosis,\u201d he wrote. \u201cStop the game of appearances: appear.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The exhibition is one of the most significant and comprehensive retrospectives ever dedicated to the artist\u2019s visionary rebelliousness. Palazzo Reale \/ \u00a9 Leonor Fini Estate, Paris<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fini\u2019s work charts a journey into the unconscious from the untamed vantage point of someone who believes in its primordial, organic power to endlessly construct new worlds\u2014especially when liberated across artistic forms. Her ever-expanding, fiercely autonomous imagination resisted all labels, even that of Surrealism, evolving into a visual language that was profoundly original yet deeply rooted in cultural history and a universal symbolic and archetypal cosmos that spanned both past and present.<\/p>\n

At the age of 12, Fini confessed to being fascinated by the dead. She would pore over obituaries, studying them with an intensity that hinted at her lifelong preoccupation with the liminal. Immobile naked men appear again and again in her work\u2014ideal subjects through which she interrogated traditional gender dynamics, disrupting the gaze with a charged mix of desire, possession and contemplation. Throughout her oeuvre, Fini grapples with timeless archetypes, constructing a personal lexicon of metaphors and allegories. Drawing from myth, literature and a reservoir of primordial imagery, her figures function as filters of memory and experience\u2014avatars from the collective unconscious reimagined through the lens of experience and memory.<\/p>\n

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Leonor Fini, Stryges Amaouri<\/em>, 1947; Oil on canvas, 45.8 x 55 cm. Private Collection \u00a9 Leonor Fini Estate, Paris<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the selection of works in the show makes clear, her practice oscillated between decadent romanticism and modern symbolism. It embodies the tension between surrendering to the dark pull of another world and gravitating toward its erotic counterforce\u2014sensuality, vitality and desire. The uneasiness and dramatic tension that pulses through her work reveal Fini\u2019s difficulty in adapting to the boundaries imposed by the world around her\u2014boundaries she could never fully accept. Her imagination was simply too vast, constantly fed by the energy of encounters, the friction of intellectual exchange and the breath of a life lived in dialogue with the most vital currents of her time. In that way, Fini\u2019s work both stands as a testament to an entire era and gestures toward something larger: the universality of a symbolic life that stretches and expands existence beyond its fleeting physical and sensory dimensions.<\/p>\n

The evolution of Leonor Fini\u2019s market<\/h3>\n

Unsurprisingly, Fini\u2019s work has undergone a significant market rediscovery\u2014one that reflects our own turbulent era, in which the imaginary and fantastical offer a seductive form of escape. Frequently associated with today\u2019s other market darling, Leonora Carrington, Fini was not just a peer but a friend. Despite their ten-year age difference, the two artists shared a mutual admiration and a lasting bond.<\/p>\n

Like Carrington, Fini has seen a notable rise in recognition and value in the auction market. Her inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams<\/i><\/a>, catalyzed renewed interest in her work, contributing to a broader reappraisal that also encompassed Carrington. In the same Sotheby\u2019s evening auction that saw Carrington\u2019s record-breaking $28.5 million sale<\/a>, Fini\u2019s Les Stylites<\/i> (The Stylists<\/i>) sold for $720,000, surpassing its high estimate of $600,000. That painting previously fetched just $129,512 at Sotheby\u2019s in 2007\u2014a clear indicator of the rapid and dramatic growth in her market value. Fini\u2019s current auction record stands at $2,319,000 for her self-portrait Autoportrait au Scorpion<\/i>, sold at Sotheby\u2019s in 2021.<\/p>\n

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An installation view of \u201cLeonor Fini: Metamorphosis\u201d at Kasmin Gallery in 2023. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, photography by Diego Flores<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Instrumental in Fini\u2019s market resurgence was the work of Kasmin Gallery, which in the following year mounted the revelatory solo exhibition \u201cLeonor Fini: Metamorphosis<\/a>.\u201d The show marked the first time the richness of her phantasmagorical universe\u2014expressed through a singularly idiosyncratic blend of paintings, drawings, sculpture and costume\u2014was presented in such depth to the American market.<\/p>\n

To better understand the mechanics behind this renewed attention, Observer spoke with Emma Bowen<\/a>, sales director at Kasmin. Bowen traces her introduction to Fini back to the 2018-19 exhibition \u201cLeonor Fini: Theater of Desire, 1930\u20131990\u201d at the Museum of Sex, which was curated by Lissa Rivera\u2014who, as it happens, had once been a student of Bowen\u2019s father at New York\u2019s SVA. \u201cIn fact, it\u2019s possible my dad was the one who suggested I see the show,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

It was Bowen who first contacted Fini\u2019s estate, which is now overseen by Arlette Souhami<\/a> of Galerie Minsky and Richard Overstreet<\/a>, the executor. \u201cArlette and Richard know Leonor\u2019s work better than anyone,\u201d Bowen said, adding that both were close to Fini during her lifetime\u2014Souhami as her dealer and Overstreet as the author of the Leonor Fini catalogue raisonn\u00e9. He continues to shape new scholarship around her work and legacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first correspondence with Arlette was over email just before the pandemic, when I reached out about borrowing a Fini for a group exhibition at the gallery,\u201d Bowen said. \u201cShe was immediately receptive and enthusiastic about working together, given Kasmin\u2019s history of mounting major historical exhibitions featuring artists in Leonor\u2019s circle, such as Max Ernst, as well as our show on the late surrealist dealer Alexander Iolas<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Fini\u2019s deeply personal practice melded coded autobiographical references to her childhood in Trieste, Italy, with Shakespeare, Greek mythology, Egyptian and medieval history and opera. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, photography by Diego Flores<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kasmin Gallery first introduced Fini\u2019s work to its audience in the 2022 group exhibition \u201cDissolving Realms<\/a>,\u201d curated by Katy Hessel<\/a>. The show gathered work by artists spanning more than 70 years in a tightly focused survey of painterly investigations into the limits of representation, reflecting on how the legacies of 20th-century artists continue to shape contemporary practice. \u201cContextualizing Fini\u2019s work alongside historical figures like Frankenthaler, Carrington and Krasner, as well as contemporary painters such as Flora Yukhnovich<\/a> and Louise Giovanelli<\/a>, was a great way to introduce Fini to the U.S. market,\u201d said Bowen.<\/p>\n

It was during her next visit to Paris that Bowen met with Souhami at her gallery. That conversation sparked the idea for a solo exhibition of Leonor\u2019s work at Kasmin Gallery, which quickly gained momentum. \u201cI feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to collaborate with them on the exhibition we then staged in New York in 2023.\u201d Since that debut, the gallery has continued to present Fini\u2019s work at major international art fairs in Mexico, London and the U.S.<\/p>\n

Commenting on the current surge in market attention, Bowen confirms that demand for Fini remains strong\u2014particularly for major paintings, which routinely exceed high estimates at auction. \u201cHer 1978 painting Rogomelec<\/i> sold well above estimate in October of last year,\u201d she noted, referring to the November result. \u201cWe continue to see strong interest from young collectors, especially in Fini\u2019s works on paper, as they offer an accessible price point for truly excellent material\u2014it\u2019s like acquiring a little piece of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIo sono LEONOR FINI<\/a>\u201d is on view at Palazzo Reale in Milan through June 22, 2025.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Leonor<\/p><\/div>\n