IRIA LEINO

(b. 1932, Helsinki; d. 2022, NY)

“Leino’s handling, however restrained, admits manifold inflections. The minimal traits are either loosely

dispersed or densely crosshatched; they stand out clearly in a serial row or blend almost indiscernibly

into the field. Anchoring the infinity of color to the finitude of the hand, they ground contemplation in

a distinctly embodied practice.”

Molly Warnock, Art Forum, January 2025

Larsen/Warner has, over the past year, initiated and realised a series of key presentations dedicated to the estate of New York–based Finnish artist Iria Leino (b. 1932, Helsinki – d. 2022, New York). This has included a focused solo exhibition of Leino’s groundbreaking abstract paintings (‘Works from the 60s & 70s’ 13 May–14 June, 2025), alongside a solo booth presentation at Market Art Fair, Stockholm (15–18 May, Booth 51, 2025). In April 2026 the gallery will be presenting a solo booth of Leino’s extraordinary work as part of the 68’Forward section at Art Brussels, and we will be presenting our second solo exhibition of Leino’s work at the Gallery in August 2026, further cementing her emerging position within a global contemporary art context. Our presentations have marked the posthumous rediscovery of a virtually unknown artist who developed a prolific and uncompromising body of work in near-complete solitude for over five decades, work that is now gaining growing international recognition. Larsen /Warner has represented the estate of Iria Leino since April 2025.

Biography of a Finnish Abstract Pioneer

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 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 . 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. In New York Leino began to cultivate her distinctive language of abstraction at The Art Students League under the guidance of the legendary artist Larry Poons.  Leino’s improvisational approach to colour 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 artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Keneth Noland. In her lifetime, Leino rarely engaged with the gallery system; the artist instead opted for an existence devoted to her studio practice and her faith in Buddhism, and much like pioneering artists such as Hilma af Klint, dedicated herself to the process of painting as a means of spiritual enlightenment.

Artistic Style and Technique

Favouring the contemplative nature of pure colour and its sensuous immediacy over the spontaneous intensity of gestural abstraction, Leino’s experimentation and manipulation of acrylic pigments during the 1960’s and 1970’s is of particular significance.  Alongside her peers in the second wave of the New York School, Leino was a pioneer in the development of a more lyrical abstraction, an antidote to the more gestural abstract expressionism that had come before. Her use of colour and even her techniques often came to her from dreams, which she recorded consistently in her journals (many hundreds were discovered in her loft upon her death). Even the spiral sgraffito in her Colourfield Series were not just decorative elements, they had deep life meanings. By 1966, Iria continued to deeply probe the Colour Field movement. She saturated large raw canvases with poured or sprayed colour but her staining technique was varied and complicated. She sometimes positioned paint cans and other objects on the unprimed canvas as it lay flat on the studio floor, thereby blocking the pigments and allowing the ghost shapes to remain. Subtle lines sometimes betray the use of a brush, and she might continue with sprays and splatters. Many of these paintings are optical forays into dreamlike worlds, often looking like aerial views, biomorphic forms, or explorations of the cosmos.

By 1966 Leino had started to adopt a new approach to Colour Field painting. Leino poured, soaked, stained and sprayed her large canvases to create broad, free-flowing areas of colour that saturated the raw canvas. But she did not slavishly follow the techniques of the leading Colour Field painters of the 50s and 60s. Her hand was instead more assertive in controlling the flow of the diluted pigments and in works such as Gold Sparkle, 1969 and Hevosen Kenka (Horseshoe), 1969 often formed nebulas areas of colour suggesting the beginning of forming stars. Such cosmic shapes were often reinforced with sgraffito — lines lightly scratched into the wet pigments. Leino recalled in 1977:

“The form disappears from my paintings altogether at the end of 1960s… I want my paintings to be looked at as colors”…The first painting, based on colors only, is No Beginning, No End. “I made this [series] when I became Buddhist, I hear these paintings as a voice. Buddhist temples have this gong they play when people come in, the sound spreads in waves.”

After surviving a serious accident in 1968 Leino converted to Buddhism in which she found a comforting and consistent philosophy. After her recovery, Leino embraced a monastic Buddhist discipline, embedding the insights she learned from her faith into her formal studio experiments. The first series of paintings that Leino created post recovery was her Elephant Series. Within Buddhism the elephant represents the enlightenment and reincarnations of Buddha. In  Leino’s sumptuous Elephant paintings, the legs and trunks of the elephant are elegantly implied by their undulating abstract shapes, and their solid fields of curving colour with crisp edges appear to have been applied with a squeegee. For one full year, Iria focused on developing a karmic relationship with the elephant, a soulmate imparting wisdom and physical and mental strength. This ushered in her ongoing practice of painting as meditation, performed with classical music. The meditative approach continued with her next major series — the Buddhist Rain Series.

Leino painstakingly overlaid thousands of diagonal strokes in horizontal rows on the  canvas, suggesting a driving rain, upon a principal field of colour. For the first time, she also painted this new series on paper, including in pastels. Richly innovative and delicate, this was a progression that continued over four decades. Before every painting session Leino started with at least one hour of Buddhist chanting, Leino recalled; 

“I had a Buddhist hymn ringing in my ears constantly, which I then painted onto the canvas. I had a Hindu mantra that had been given to me, but you were not supposed to stay it aloud. So, I repeated that in my paintings. Then came the visual side and now I only see the art.” 

After 1969, and for the next fifteen years, there would be no signs of Iria returning to a brush. This partly explains why, after her death, no brushes could be found in her studio, only an assortment of trowels, scrapers, and squeegees. One of her large canvases from this period was purchased by Larry Aldrich and in 1973 exhibited in “Contemporary Reflections” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Also in 1973, one of her large paintings was chosen for the exhibition, “Women Choose Women’s Painting and Sculpture,” at the New York Cultural Center. James Mellow’s review in the New York Times selected only three women whose abstractions were outstanding: “Alice Baber’s delicate veils of color, Carmen Herrera’s incisive geometry in Cobalto Blanco, and Iria’s handsomely tapestried Wish Answered.”

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of great creative and developmental experimentation for Iria, culminating in the 3 visually distinct series of paintings that have come to define this period for Leino; Colourfield, Elephant and Buddhist Rain series. But even when Leino’s personal life felt overwhelming, her disciplined work ethic, dedicated and obsessive studio practice and spiritual connection led to further extraordinary painterly experiments throughout her life up until her death in 2022. 

In her lifetime, Leino rarely engaged with the gallery system. The artist instead opted for an existence devoted to her studio practice and her faith in Buddhism, and much like pioneering female abstract artists such as Hilma af Klint, saw her work as a means of spiritual enlightenment rather than a purely commercial endeavour. After her death in 2022 there were over 1000 paintings and works on paper left within her Soho loft; an extraordinary time capsule of work of exceptional quality that helps to broaden the story of 20th Century abstract painting in an incredibly powerful way. With recent acclaimed solo exhibitions in New York and Scandinavia and acquisitions to major European and American Institutional collections, Leino is rightly now being considered among the most important Scandinavian artistic discoveries of the past 50 years.

Read more about Iria Leino: The Hidden World of Iria Leino Market Art Fair, Iria Leino Vogue Scandinavia, Iria Leino in Artforum, Iria Leino’s Fairytale Life in Kunstkritikk, Iria Leino in the New York Times.

IRIA - THE FILM

Filmmakers Janna Kyllästinen and Kati Aho are developing a beautiful documentoray film that follows and explores the life and work of Iria Leino. A vivid mix of footage from her loft to her art and archival portraiture is combined with 8mm film and camcorder video vignettes inspired by Iria’s diary entries on her daily life, dreams and spiritual divinations. The film follows Iria’s journey into afterlife, as the Iria Leino Trust partners with solo exhibitions in New York, Helsinki, Stockholm and beyond to bring her work to a wider audience. Watch a teaser to the film below.

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