Iria Leino, FI

Iria Leino was born in Finland in 1932 and completed her degree at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955.

Immersed in both painting and fashion during her student years, she moved to Paris after graduation to continue her training at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. During her time in Paris, she caught the attention of the late Madame Grès—the queen of haute couture—and Karl Lagerfeld, who launched her career as a model. Leino then set aside her brush to grace the runways of Europe as the supermodel IRIA, walking for major fashion houses such as Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin and popularizing a hairstyle known as nouvelle vague.

Despite being embraced by the world of luxury, she suffered immensely throughout this period, enduring various mental health challenges driven by the industry’s unsustainable beauty standards. At the peak of her success in 1964, she suddenly abandoned her modeling career and settled in a gritty SoHo loft among New York City’s bohemian community, more than 3,500 miles from the capital of couture. This dramatic transition marked the beginning of Leino’s ascetic life as a dedicated abstract painter.

Soon after relocating to New York, Leino began to cultivate her distinctive language of abstraction at The Art Students League under the guidance of Larry Poons. Leino’s improvisational approach to colour and form was driven by her desire to fully express herself through painting and nothing else—a commitment to the medium that echoed the philosophical provocations of the New York School.

In 1968, Leino suffered a severe head injury that left her in a coma for weeks. This event profoundly impacted her art practice, provoking her to reassess her aesthetic direction. After her recovery, Leino embraced a monastic Buddhist discipline, embedding the insights she learned from her faith into her formal studio experiments. Favoring the contemplative nature of pure colour and its sensuous immediacy over the spontaneous intensity of gestural abstraction, Leino dedicated several years to developing dozens of immersive colour field and lyrically abstract paintings.

Leino’s vigorous manipulation of acrylic pigment was particularly significant in this formative period of the 20th century: the water-based medium was relatively new and not favored by artists at the time. The paint’s viscous nature and ability to dehydrate quickly without the oily blemishes associated with dried linseed paint offered exponential opportunities for formal exploration. Like her peers in the second generation of the New York School—Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and her former teacher, Larry Poons—Leino was a pioneer in the turn towards lyrical abstraction, inviting acrylic paint to inform the terms of this nascent artistic vocabulary.

Although Leino was exceptionally ambitious, foregrounding a rigorous painterly practice comparable to her contemporaries, the artist repeatedly rejected the idea of transforming her creations into a professional endeavor. She ultimately believed that her creative pursuits served a higher metaphysical purpose, one that could not be fulfilled by the materialistic gains of fame and commercial recognition. Leino would continue to experiment with colour and repetitive mark-making within her oeuvre until her death in 2022.

During her lifetime, Leino’s body of work remained hidden from the public eye, staged frozen in the time capsule of her SoHo loft.