“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 is thrilled to announce our upcoming solo presentations from the estate of New York-based Finnish artist Iria Leino (b.1932, Helsinki – d. 2022, NYC) For a temporary period between 13 May – 14 June, we are excited to be taking over the renowned gallery space at Hudiksvallsgatan 8 that was previously home to Galerie Nordenhake, with a solo exhibition of Iria Leino’s groundbreaking abstract painting. Alongside this we will be presenting a solo booth of her extraordinary work at Market Art Fair, Liljevalchs+ Konsthall (15 – 18 May, Booth 51) These two presentations mark the posthumous discovery of a virtually unknown artist who created a prolific body of work in solitude for over 50 years and who’s work is now garnering international acclaim.
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. She juxtaposed brilliant primary colours in dynamic arrangements within her deeply gestural practice, responding to the charged compositions produced by the first generation of Abstract Expressionists. 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.
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 60’s and 70’s is of particular significance and the main focus of our presentations. Alongside her peers in the second wave of the New York School such as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons, 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. Even the spiral sgraffito in her colour field paintings were not just decorative elements, they had deep life meanings.
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. We are thrilled to include two important early examples of Leino’s first development of pure colour painting No Beginning, No End (Pink), 1969 and No Beginning, No End (No.1), 1969. 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. It was during this time that Leino began to develop her Buddhist Rain series of which Guiding Angel, 1970 is a glorious example. Leino painstakingly overlaid thousands of diagonal strokes in horizontal rows on the canvas, suggesting a driving rain, upon a principal field of colour. 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.”
The curvilinear biomorphic shapes that enliven the canvas of Leino’s Hands series relate to the paper cut- outs of flowers created by Henri Matisse and the similarly spirited shapes of flower blossoms created by Jean Arp. In Each is densely populated by “hands” of various colours, their bright bold pigments remind us that in the summer of 1969 at Woodstock Music Festival heralded the feeling of flower power, peace, not war and free love. Leino only created 4 works in this series and as such they stand as a bold and concerted outburst produced during the course of only a few months.
On Leino’s death in 2022 she left behind almost 1000 paintings and works on paper in the time capsule of her SoHo loft. Our duo presentations provide a unique opportunity to experience her work and pay homage to this undiscovered painter; shedding light on her incisive contributions to the history of postwar abstraction. This will be the first time Leino’s work has been exhibited in Sweden since 1977, when her work was included in the exhibition ‘Finsk bild: aktuell skulptur, måleri och grafik at Liljevalchs Konsthall in 1977 where she showed a selection of works from her Buddhist Rain series. With recent acclaimed solo exhibitions in New York and Helsinki and acquisitions to major European and American collections Leino is rightly now being considered among the most important Scandinavian artistic discoveries of the past 50 years.
