Max Ernst used to call her ‘the Italian fury in Paris’; Jean Cocteau said her paintings were the expression of ‘something supernatural, though real to her’. Leonor Fini is a refined, eclectic, glamorous, cosmopolitan self-taught artist, author, and set designer who moved to Paris in the 1930s. She came in contact with the surrealist society by experimenting with their techniques and their themes, theorising the serendipitous juxtaposition of materials and images of objects of enigmatic psychoanalytical symbology. Her existential experience turns into the paintings of her mature phase as an artist, where we shall find her adored cats, sphynxes, lovers, and women of perturbing beauty.
