" Je peins des choses qui n'existent pas et que j'aimerais voir."
Leonor Fini (1907 - 1996) is considered one of the most important women artists of the 20th century. Her fertile imagination and the dreamlike nature of her work have often led to her being labeled a surrealist. Although close to Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim and Dora Maar she always refused to be associated with their manifestos or in anyway aligned with their group. She went entirely her own way. Her talent and unique vision as an artist, her public persona and her exceptional charisma made her a celebrity of post-war Parisian life.
Her art began to be recognized in the early 30’s when she was the first artist chosen by Christian Dior to show at his gallery before he became a couturier, a few years prior to her sharing an exhibition alongside Max Ernst in her first New York show at the Julien Levy gallery. This was in 1936, the same year she was chosen to take part in the landmark MOMA exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism. At the end of the decade she was asked by her friend Leo Castelli to curate an exhibition of surreal furniture at the inaugural exhibition of his first gallery, Place Vendôme in Paris.
After the war she was one of the most sought after personalities at the celebrated Parisian costume balls. For over twenty years, while continuing her life as an artist her creativity extended to book illustration as well as set and costume design for numerous operas and film as well as for over forty plays, mainly for the theater in Paris.
Leonor Fini’s paintings are an imaginary theater of Dionysian feasts, androgynous dream states with strong undercurrents of social revolt, always infused with a deeply erotic tension. As she has said: “I always imagined I would have a life very different from the one that was imagined for me, but I understood from a very early age that I would have to revolt to make that happen.”