Leonor Fini – Réalisme irréel

Weinstein Gallery presents Leonor Fini – Réalisme irréel, a new exhibition of works by one of the most important, idiosyncratic, and misunderstood artists of the 20th century, now through December 5, 2015. Fini’s vital and striking work is rich with sexual tension, mythic and cosmic imagery, and a boldness of vision that affirms her status as one of modernism’s great feminist vanguards. The exhibition features paintings and works on paper from throughout Fini’s six- decade career, as well as never-before-seen photographs and writings from the Leonor Fini Archive, Paris.

Leonor Fini was one of modernism’s great nonconformists, and a pioneer in both art and lifestyle. Fini utterly rejected those who called her a Surrealist, or even a “woman artist,” preferring to stake her own claim on modernism with a vision that owes more to the farthest shores of her imagination than to any affiliation with art trends, schools or movements. Over the course of her life, Fini knew and collaborated with some of the most remarkable thinkers and artists of the century, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Federico Fellini, and Jean Cocteau, who praised Fini’s paintings as possessing a quality of “réalisme irréel,” in which the natural becomes supernatural, and the supernatural, natural. Max Ernst described her paintings thusly: “Her paintings are made up of vertigo... inhabited by the most astonishing collection of legendary beings... Miraculous plays of darkness and light are given ultimate expression in the pulsating pearly colors of this chimerical flesh, that resembles the bifid love- making of sphinxes."

Weinstein Gallery is pleased to announce that on Sunday, November 1 at 1:30PM, the art historian Whitney Chadwick, one of the world’s foremost experts on Surrealism, will lead a special discussion and gallery tour. The event is free and open to the public.