"I am not a surrealist. I am Leonor Fini."
Leonor Fini was an artist, writer, designer, mystic, and enigma — a woman who turned herself into a work of art and never asked for permission. She was born in Buenos Aires to an Italian mother and Argentine father but was raised in the culturally charged city of Trieste, where she developed, early on, an intuitive understanding of transformation, beauty, and power.
Her childhood was marked by drama: her father kidnapped her as a baby, only for her mother to retrieve her and flee to Europe. In early 20th-century Trieste — a vibrant port city on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — Leonor found herself in a world where everything was hybrid: languages, identities, ideologies. It was a cosmopolitan melting pot where artists, poets, philosophers, and free thinkers gathered.
Trieste was an intellectual magnet at the time. James Joyce was writing Ulysses there, Italo Svevo was discovering modernism, and psychoanalysis and mysticism found fertile ground. As a teenager, Fini became fascinated by Freud, Jung, mythology, magic, androgyny, and cats. Her intellectual hunger was boundless, her imagination limitless.
In the 1930s, she moved to Paris, where she quickly entered the circles of Max Ernst, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Jean Cocteau. Ernst described her as an "Italian fury of scandalous elegance, whimsy, and passion." She exhibited with the surrealists but rejected their dogmas. She was autonomous. Not a surrealist — but a world unto herself.
Fini’s work centers on women, but without submission. Her paintings feature long-haired, hybrid creatures: goddesses, cats, singers, sphinxes, reclining on velvet or floating through dreamlike atmospheres. She also designed costumes for opera and theatre, illustrated erotic novels, and lived in interiors filled with cats, masks, mirrors, and lovers. She referred to her romantic companions as “amis amoreuses” — friends, lovers, soul satellites — orbiting her in ever-shifting constellations.
Until her death in 1996, she continued to paint, to collect, and to live by her own laws. Her work is a celebration of feminine power, the mystery of identity, and the theatre of existence.
In Milan, the exhibition "Io sono LEONOR FINI" is on display at Palazzo Reale. Originally scheduled from February 26 to June 22, 2025, the exhibition has been extended until July 20, 2025.