Iria Leino: 1968–1970
Harper's, New York
September 4 – October 19, 2024
Harper’s presents Iria Leino: 1968–1970, the first solo exhibition from the estate of New York-based Finnish artist IRIA LEINO (1932–2022). The exhibition features a selection of nine historic paintings at Harper’s Chelsea 512, marking the posthumous discovery of a virtually unknown artist who created a prolific body of work in solitude for over 40 years.
In her lifetime, Iria Leino rarely engaged with the gallery system. The artist instead opted for an existence devoted to her studio practice and her faith in Buddhism, seeing her work as a means of spiritual enlightenment rather than a commercial endeavor. This presentation highlights the first two series that sparked her lifelong exploration of acrylic paint’s viscosity across a range of styles: the Color Field series and the Buddhist Rain series. Several of Leino’s Buddhist Rain pieces are included in the gallery’s booth at The Armory Show from September 5–8, 2024. These presentations offer the public a chance to experience Leino’s paintings for the very first time, half a century after they were produced.
Iria Leino was born in Finland in 1932 and completed her degree at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955. Immersed in both painting and fashion during her student years, she moved to Paris after graduation to continue her training at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Leino became a fashion correspondent to supplement her studies in this pivotal time, reporting on the latest trends emerging from the city’s avant-garde cultural scene. With her striking high cheekbones and piercing blue-green eyes, she caught the attention of the late Madame Grès—the queen of haute couture—and Karl Lagerfeld, who launched her career as a model. Leino then set aside her brush to grace the runways of Europe as the supermodel IRIA, walking for major fashion houses such as Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin, and popularizing a hairstyle known as nouvelle vague. Despite being embraced by the world of luxury, she suffered immensely throughout this period, struggling with an eating disorder and enduring various mental health challenges driven by the industry’s unsustainable beauty standards. At the peak of her success in 1964, she suddenly abandoned her modeling career and settled in a gritty SoHo loft among New York City’s bohemian community, more than 3,500 miles from the capital of couture. This dramatic transition marked the beginning of Leino’s ascetic life as a dedicated abstract painter.
Soon after relocating to New York, Iria Leino began to cultivate her distinctive language of abstraction at The Art Students League under the guidance of Larry Poons. She juxtaposed brilliant primary colors in dynamic arrangements within her deeply gestural practice, responding to the charged compositions produced by the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. Leino’s improvisational approach to color and form was driven by her desire to fully express herself through painting and nothing else—a commitment to the medium that echoed the philosophical provocations of the New York School. While the work she created at The Art Students League demonstrated that she was already a natural talent, it was a health crisis that would catalyze her unique vision.
In 1968, Iria Leino suffered a severe head injury that left her in a coma for weeks. This event profoundly impacted her art practice, provoking her to reassess her aesthetic direction. After her recovery, Leino embraced a monastic Buddhist discipline, embedding the insights she learned from her faith into her formal studio experiments. Favoring the contemplative nature of pure color and its sensuous immediacy over the spontaneous intensity of gestural abstraction, Leino dedicated several years to developing dozens of immersive color field and lyrically abstract paintings. Iria Leino: 1968–1970 encompasses some of the most compelling examples from this moment of creative innovation.
Within both the Color Field and the Buddhist Rain series, Leino’s sweeping expanses of warm and cool acrylic pigments subtly evoke the landscape, cosmos, and Earth’s fauna in their abstract forms. The artist’s methodical process involved staining unprimed canvases with ethereal hues by spraying, pouring, and splattering the paint directly onto the surface—all without the use of a brush. In the Buddhist Rain series, these prismatic fields of color were then layered with delicate pastel markings, executed with meticulous precision. Across these luminous works, hundreds of thin, diagonal strokes extend to infinity as they cascade down radiant washes of color. In Kevainen Lampi (Spring Pond), glowing orange tones encircle the edge of the frame, drawing all energy toward the center as the shades bleed into swaths of sage and yellow, while bands of emerald and ivory dashes trickle across the composition. In the painting Explosive Thunder, she takes a more all-over approach, with amber and saffron pastel striations gently fading into fields of green.
For the Color Field series, the artist incorporated multifaceted styles, openly experimenting with different media and techniques. Leino began to use aerosol and other staining methods in her compositions to reveal the interplay between broad areas of acrylic paint on her surfaces. At times, she sprayed pigments with varying intensities over pastel or colored pencil tracings, while on other occasions, she rubbed layering blotches into the cotton fibers to conjure organic forms. The pulsing gradients of orange and golden hues softly coat vascular lines in Balloons #4, while a tear-shaped black stain seems to penetrate a crimson sphere in Eyes Apple. In both paintings, Leino appears to reference the body at the cellular level, while also alluding to the works of early modernist artists like Wassily Kandinsky, who believed that abstract manifestations of the physical world could capture the spiritual dimensions of our inner selves.
Iria Leino’s vigorous manipulation of acrylic pigment was particularly significant in this formative period of the 20th century: the water-based medium was relatively new and not favored by artists at the time. The paint’s viscous nature and ability to dehydrate quickly without the oily blemishes associated with dried linseed paint offered exponential opportunities for formal exploration. Like her peers in the second generation of the New York School—Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and her former teacher, Larry Poons—Leino was a pioneer in the turn towards lyrical abstraction, inviting acrylic paint to inform the terms of this nascent artistic vocabulary.
Although Iria Leino was exceptionally ambitious, foregrounding a rigorous painterly practice comparable to her contemporaries, the artist repeatedly rejected the idea of transforming her creations into a professional endeavor. She ultimately believed that her creative pursuits served a higher metaphysical purpose, one that could not be fulfilled by the materialistic gains of fame and commercial recognition. Iria Leino would continue to experiment with color and repetitive mark-making within her oeuvre until her death in 2022. Through her process-based works, which she approached with the discipline required by meditation itself, the artist found spiritual and emotional liberation beyond the confines of the official art world. For, in her mind, the competitive industry of visual culture was all too similar to the fashion milieu she left behind. During her lifetime, Leino’s body of work remained hidden from the public eye, staged like frozen opera in the time capsule of her loft. Despite her withdrawal from the limelight, the artist sustained a momentous yet silent dialogue with her generation. Iria Leino: 1968–1970 pays homage to this undiscovered painter, shedding light on her incisive contributions to the history of postwar abstraction.
HARPER'S CHELSEA 512
512 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
