The Hidden World of Iria Leino

Leino quickly rose to fame and walked for fashion houses such as Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin, becoming famous for her hairstyle known as nouvelle vague. But the fashion industry’s harsh demands and unsustainable beauty standards took a toll on Iria Leino, and at the peak of her success in 1964, she decided to abandon her modeling career and settle in a loft in Soho, among New York City’s bohemian community of artists and musicians. It was in her Soho loft that Iria Leino picked up her brush again and began an ascetic life devoted to painting. In the city, Leino started to develop her distinctive style of abstraction under the guidance of Larry Poons at The Art Students League. 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, prompting her to reassess her aesthetic direction. After her recovery, Leino embraced a monastic Buddhist discipline, embedding the insights she gained 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 creating 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 widely favoured 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 endeavour. 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.

While Leino’s body of work remained hidden from the public eye during her lifetime, preserved in the time capsule of her Soho loft, her legacy as a pioneer of lyrical abstraction and her commitment to the contemplative nature of art are undeniable. Now, as her work is poised for rediscovery, it offers a unique opportunity to explore an artist who, for decades, deliberately chose the path of anonymity. Leino’s paintings, infused with spiritual depth and innovative use of color, invite a fresh dialogue with contemporary audiences, positioning her not only as a significant figure of the New York School but as a deeply personal artist whose work transcends time and trends.