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Additional cultural and artistic information about the artist
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This cosmopolitan artist (born in Argentina to an Italian mother, and choosing to live and work in Paris) crossed the 20th century in search of herself. Almost unclassifiable, Leonor FINI became, through her choice of subjects, the companion of the Surrealists, but it should not be mistaken, it is more her personal obsessions that connected her to this group than any need for belonging to a strong current in painting. Her fantastical universe, filled with figures, sometimes grimacing, of undeniable plastic beauty, is one of the most personal and accomplished of the 20th century.
Leonor FINI was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1908. At a very young age, she moved with her mother to her family in Italy. There, she had a privileged childhood and adolescence in a bourgeois and highly cultured environment.
However, she left this world early to settle in Paris, where she began painting in the mid-1930s.
Her artistic influences stem from the painting of the Quattrocento and the Mannerists of the 16th century. A rich and demanding technique was always present in her work. But her subjects, on the other hand, are more readily associated with Surrealism. She even participated in the exhibition dedicated to them in London in 1936 at the Burlington Gallery.
Leonor FINI - Original Lithograph: The Show Her career also included numerous book illustrations (Poe, Baudelaire, Cocteau, among others) and a long and lasting collaboration with theater and opera, allowing her to express her taste for the stage and spectacle.
She passed away in Paris, her adopted city, in 1996, after a rich career where the search for herself in each of her subjects spoke to the eternal confrontation for a painter with the strange mirror that is the canvas.
(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES
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