Rafaela

Leonor Fini

Argentine-born French painter and printmaker Leonor Fini's style in all mediums was often ethereal, haunting-- qualities she managed to execute in a medium far more unforgiving than oils or watercolors. This image was done using screenprinting that mimics the softness of lithography.

Fini exhibited with the Surrealists in the 1930s including the exhibitions “Surrealism” in London (Burlington Gallery, 1936), and in New York (“Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”, 1936). Surrealists Paul Eluard and Giorgio de Chirico were the preface writers of her catalogue for her first personal exhibition in New York (1938).

Fini's work contain and challenge images that many of her male Surrealists explored, but from a woman's perspective; fantastic landscapes, bald women, germinations with almost abstract style, always marked by the surreal strangeness. Fini used the ambiguity of the covered subject, an intensified femininity, often coupled with a surreal erotism or opaque environments. There is always a mystery in her compositions.