Leonor Fini (1907-1996)

Explore Leonor Fini’s magical world of ideas –  in her first major retrospective in Germany

A notable book in the fall arts season: a comprehensive look at Leonor Fini, a rebel in both her work and her personal life. Her brilliantly painted dreamlike scenes featuring powerful women, priestesses, and sphinxes play with gender roles and invite the viewer into a fantastical world. Fini’s self-assured examination of her role as artist and woman is strikingly on display.

Some 150 paintings, drawings, and objects spanning 70 years showcase Fini’s unmistakable visual language, suspended between dream, myth, and theatrical staging. Emancipation, gender, eros, death, and transformation pervade her work, as does a playful use of masks, costumes, and role play. Numerous photographs and a detailed biography offer insights into the captivating personality of an artist who, from the very start, fashioned herself as a free-spirited and glamorous icon.