Once upon a time, there was a beautiful Finnish girl called Irja. She ventured out into the world and became the fashion model IRIA, known all over Paris. After a while, she grew tired of the shallow fashion world and moved to New York. In Manhattan, she rented a cheap loft and from then on spent her days creating art. When she died more than fifty years later, she left behind nearly a thousand paintings, a veritable art treasure…
This is roughly how the life of painter Iria Leino (1932–2022) is narrated in her posthumous launch. She is the heroine of a modern fairy tale, the princess who chooses art over love. She is the starving artist who never sold anything, the independent woman who gets her due only after her death. She is a pioneer, a mystery. In short: she is an archetype.
The happy ending attributed to Leino’s story is that within just a few years of her death, her paintings are being exhibited internationally, initially in the United States, Finland, and Sweden. When the first posthumous solo exhibition opened in the fall of 2024 at the New York gallery Harper’s, The New York Times published a long article about the artist. The works sold like hot cakes. The hype now continues on this side of the Atlantic. Leino’s first show in her native Finland is in grand style at Helsinki’s Galerie Forsblom. In May, her works will travel to Stockholm, where Larsen Warner is both hosting a gallery exhibition and showing Leino at Market Art Fair.
So, what are they like, these paintings that have bided their time for so many decades? Leino worked in relative isolation in her loft studio, and is said to have categorically snubbed cautiously interested acquaintances. Yet, the majority of the seventeen monumental and colourful acrylic paintings on view at Forsblom – created during the latter half of the 1960s, shortly after Leino left Europe – are both typical of their time and strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism, so deeply associated with New York. Then again, Leino had marinated herself wholeheartedly in the local art scene during her first years in the US, studying with the painter Larry Poons. Indeed, Poons’s influence can be glimpsed in works such as the fluid The Finnish Spring (1976).
Harper’s Gallery also focused on the artist’s early work. This is hardly a coincidence. Leino is being launched with a carefully crafted strategy, and her paintings from the late 1960s seem to be the lightest and easiest part of her oeuvre. A suitable gateway, you might say. To put it more bluntly: these are paintings that sell. Mainly, Leino seems to have worked with an almost (but never completely) square format, about two metres in height. The size is impressive without being overwhelming or unwieldy, and her tones of reds and oranges are undeniably arresting. Adding to this harmony are the soft, almost friendly, shapes of the abstract subjects, and the almost-sheer layers of paint that characterise her early New York works. When I look at them, I feel welcomed rather than diminished – a pleasant feeling.
Although Leino worked in acrylics, her paintings are anything but plasticky. Several of them are executed by spraying thin layers so that the natural white and slightly rough surface of the canvas becomes part of the work. At Forsblom, this technique is best represented by No Beginning No End (Half Moon 2) and No Beginning No End (Sunrise) (both 1969). As the titles suggest, Leino has based her work on the circular form, evoking celestial bodies. In both paintings, thanks to the technical execution, she has achieved a luminosity with an inherent pull.
Little intellectual effort is needed to absorb Leino’s works from the 60s. On the other hand, they have an emotional charge that is vague and elusive, but not insignificant. Sometime around 1968–69, Leino became interested in Buddhism and yoga. Yet, the sensitivity of her paintings does not, at least initially, have a particularly New Age flavour; instead, they quite elegantly convey a form of vulnerability. In Balloons No. 2 (1969), Leino dips her toes into the figurative and transforms her earlier circles into balloons. The result is more melancholy than humorous.
A slightly sad mood is conveyed by the ‘Elephant Series’(1968), created shortly after Leino suffered a skull fracture when a glass bottle was thrown from a roof and hit her in the head. The elephant acts as a comforting guide, but is abstracted and simplified beyond recognition. Unfortunately, I get the sense that these paintings are being shown here primarily as home decor for people who can easily invest EUR 55,000 in the Iria Leino narrative. A commercial gallery’s primary task is to sell art, of course, but the selection at Forsblom really hammers home this vulgar fact. I can easily imagine Kendall Roy, the broken but revolting billionaire son on the TV show Succession, having one of Leino’s elephant paintings in his huge bachelor pad.
Perhaps Kati Laakso, director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, put her finger on the problem in an Vogue Scandinavia-interview last fall: “Her [Leino’s] style evokes a lot of emotions, especially if you’ve been lucky enough to see the art in her loft in Soho.” And in both The New York Times and Kulttuuriykkönen on the Finnish radio, Laakso eagerly mentioned all the beautiful clothes and countless high heels found in the artist’s studio. I understand that the atmosphere in Leino’s time-capsule home must have been mesmerising and glamorous in the shabby way that characterises the New York City of myth. But what happens if you strip away all context and ignore the artist’s cool loft? The paintings are still attractive, but hardly unique.
It’s not really possible to draw any conclusions about Leino’s work based on this exhibition. The complete focus on forging a glossy narrative yields, paradoxically, a rather narrow and two-dimensional image of the artist. She is hard to grasp, and so distant that I find it difficult to identify her voice even while standing in front of her paintings.
The Leino case is, of course, an interesting example of the importance of a really good story (and media strategy), and the seemingly unquenchable thirst for ‘rediscovered’ women artists. There is every indication that the artist herself was aware of this. In her old age, she seems to have realised that her lack of heirs meant that her entire life’s work could risk ending up in a dumpster after her death. So she appointed a lawyer to set up a foundation in her name. When she was young, Leino had bought a small apartment in Paris with the money she earned as a model, and by selling it, The Iria Leino Trust gained a starting capital of EUR 650,000. With this money, the foundation has been able to hire the American curator and consultant Peter Hastings Falk, who has certainly done a solid job of compiling and packaging Leino’s legacy.
The best fairy tales have ambiguous endings, and that’s also the case here. When I looked into who the foundation’s profits ultimately benefit, my jaw dropped. All the money goes to Integral Yoga International and its headquarters in Yogaville, Virginia. The organisation was founded by Swami Satchidananda Saraswati, known as the Woodstock Guru after arriving at the legendary festival in 1969 by helicopter and leading the crowd in a recitation of a Hindu mantra. He is also famous for having repeatedly been accused of sexually molesting his students. But apparently his teachings brought great comfort to Iria Leino. Happy endings come in many forms.
