Iria Leino: From Pouring to Paintings-as-Sculpture

In Iria Leino’s art, the Finnish landscape is intertwined with a spiritual quest. Born in Helsinki and active as an artist in New York from the 1960s onward, Leino seamlessly incorporated imagery drawn from Finland’s lakes, forests and waterways, as well as from meditation and the avant-garde artist circles of SoHo.

In her work, Leino sought to preserve her Finnish heritage and connection to nature, fueled by her spiritual search in Buddhism. From Pouring to Paintings-as-Sculpture is Leino’s first themed exhibition to explore the evolution and significance of her three-dimensional paintings. Her first posthumous exhibition, and her debut at Galerie Forsblom, took place in 2025, featuring the color-drenched works of the Elephant series.

Curated by art historian Peter Hastings Falk, this new exhibition focuses on Leino’s later oeuvre and her gradual transition from flat pictorial surfaces towards a more sculptural approach to painting.

The exhibition presents two series, Flat Pours and Topographics. The latter is the more extensive, tracing Leino’s artistic development through two sub-series: Topographics by Erosion and Heavy Topographics.

The Flat Pours series features irregular, narrow streaks of paint drizzled in dynamic vertical patterns and punctuated by controlled splashes. Its palette draws on the colors of Finland’s forests and the rugged beauty of its coastlines. From here, Leino moved deliberately towards greater three-dimensionality. In the Topographics series, she began embedding sand, pebbles and, later, a variety of found objects in increasingly thick layers of paint, creating vigorously sculpted surfaces reminiscent of terrain shaped by the forces of nature. 

Galerie Forsblom’s exhibition pays tribute to this body of sculptural paintings, which Leino herself considered among her most significant artistic achievements. It also traces her artistic development towards a form of painting in which color, materiality, texture, and three-dimensionality become inextricably intertwined. 

Iria Leino is a distinctive figure in Finnish art. After graduating from the School of Art and Design in 1955, she left her hometown of Helsinki for Paris, where she continued her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts. In Paris, Leino worked as a model for Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain, among others. In 1964, she moved to New York and settled in SoHo in 1966, thereafter devoting herself exclusively to her artistic practice.

Although Leino was active on the New York art scene, she worked independently. She rarely exhibited her work, instead immersing herself in her art and Buddhist practice. Following her death in 2022, more than a thousand paintings were discovered in her SoHo loft. Her works are held in internationally prestigious collections, including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the New England Centre for Contemporary Art, and the UNICEF collections in the United States, as well as the collections of the Amos Anderson Fund and the Finnish National Gallery in Finland.

For inquiries and previews, please contact: 
Marjatta Latvanen, Sales Director
marjatta@galerieforsblom.com