Harper’s is pleased to announce the second installment of Iria Leino: In Two Parts—The Suomen Suo and Colorfield Series. On view from October 9 through November 8, the exhibition spotlights the body of work Leino developed in the late 1960s, known as the Colorfield series—a pivotal style that catalyzed her distinct painterly approach for the remainder of her career. Remarkably, these ambitious canvases were only recently unearthed, rolled up in several tubes hidden above and behind storage racks as the artist’s estate prepared to vacate her loft. Their discovery coincides with the presentation of works from her Buddhist Rain series, completed around the same period, at Frieze Masters in London, October 15 through 19. Iria Leino: In Two Parts—The Colorfield Series continues the gallery’s commitment to unveiling the historic oeuvre of a reclusive artist whose sensibility played a decisive role in shaping the visual language of her era—a legacy that is only now revealing its full significance.
Created between 1967 and 1969, Leino’s Colorfield series marks the beginning of her decades-long exploration of acrylic paint as a medium in its own right. With these nine paintings on view, the evolution from her early New York paintings to the signature brushless technique that would define her mature style becomes strikingly apparent. Although this shift was precipitated by a traumatic brain injury that left her in a coma for weeks in 1968, the transformation in her style nonetheless reveals a deep continuity with her earlier convictions.
After settling into New York’s bohemian art scene in 1964, Leino was intent on rekindling her original ambition of becoming a studio artist—a pursuit that had been sidelined by her successful career as a fashion model in Paris. After a period of moving between temporary studios, she eventually established herself in a SoHo loft in 1966, but during these interim years she enrolled at the Art Students League, where she began experimenting with gestural mark-making and spontaneous arrangements on easel-sized canvases. Her subsequent move to a Greene Street studio soon afforded her the freedom to pursue her practice on a larger scale and at a more prolific pace. By the late 1960s, Leino was painting exclusively with acrylic pigments in an increasingly deliberate and controlled manner, investigating how bold shapes, colors, and forms could interact within a formal composition on expansive surfaces.
In Iria Leino: In Two Parts—The Colorfield Series, the three largest works on view—each measuring roughly seven by seven feet—stand as hallmarks of this emergent style. Depicting large orbs in the lower-right quadrant of the picture plane, encircled by three smaller ones in multiple colors like moons orbiting a planet, each piece explores these motifs through distinct palettes and varied paint applications. Leino referred to them as the Völva paintings, a term derived from Norse mythology that translates to “staff carrier” or “wand-wed,” an homage to her Nordic roots. The word refers to female seers who practiced seiðr, a form of magic involving rituals that prophesied the future or sought to alter destiny.
This fascination with premodern mysticism not only planted the seeds for Leino’s later conversion to Buddhism in 1968 but also illuminated her philosophy regarding the artist’s role. As she described her process, she released unconscious emotions by “pouring [them] out into the actual painting without further thought,” as if guided by a realm beyond her own control. While this spiritual dimension defined the conceptual tenor of her practice, the Völva paintings also embody the beginnings of her evolving technique within the Colorfield series, characterized by an emphasis on chromatic saturation, compositional balance, and the dynamic interplay between controlled gesture and spontaneous flow.
The additional paintings included in the exhibition represent Leino’s commitment to the idiosyncratic qualities of acrylic that are not easily achievable with oil paint. In these works, she fully embraced methods such as soak-staining and airbrushing watered-down pigment across the picture plane, minimizing the use of a brush or abandoning it altogether, as she resolved to do during this period of her career. Here, her two-dimensional surfaces remain wafer-thin, allowing the purity of her colors to span and mingle across the compositions without interruption. Such an approach—novel at the time, since acrylic pigments could be thinned in ways that linseed oil could not—channels techniques adopted by contemporaries such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski. Leino also employed circular forms in many of these paintings, particularly in The Stranger and Reflexion, revealing her sustained interest in the spiritual iconography first explored in the Völva paintings. These formal and conceptual innovations mark a crucial turning point in the development of her studio practice—one that would shape the trajectory of her mature work throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Together, the September and October installments of Iria Leino: In Two Parts—The Suomen Suo and Colorfield Series trace a pivotal span in the artist’s career, from her breakthrough in the Suomen Suo series to the earlier Colorfield canvases that laid its foundation. By bringing these bodies of work into dialogue for the first time, the two-part exhibition illuminates Leino’s legacy and affirms the depth and scope of her contribution to postwar abstraction.
Iria Leino (b. 1932, Helsinki, Finland; d. 2022, New York, NY) was a visual artist based in New York City until her death in 2022. Upon receiving a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki in 1954, Leino moved to Paris to continue her studies at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Here, she caught the attention of Madame Grès and Karl Lagerfeld, thus launching her career as a fashion model of international renown. At the peak of her success in 1964, Leino abandoned her modeling career and relocated to New York City’s bohemian epicenter, SoHo. During her lifetime, Leino intentionally held back her work from the public eye, with notable exceptions. In 1973, Leino was included in the groundbreaking Women Choose Women, curated by Lucy Lippard, the first major large-scale presentation of female artists in New York. The same year, she participated in Second Annual Contemporary Reflections, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT. From the mid-1970s to her death, Leino garnered sporadic recognition in the form of museum exhibitions in Finland and Sweden, institutional patronage, as well as a multi-year installation at John F. Kennedy Airport’s Finnair terminal. Posthumously, her work has been the subject of presentations at Harper’s, New York (2025 and 2024); Larsen Warner, Stockholm (2025); Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki (2025); and Frieze Masters, London (forthcoming). Reviews have been published in New York Times, Artforum, Vogue Scandinavia, and W Magazine, among other publications. Leino’s work is held in the collections of Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, and Heino Art Foundation, Helsinki. IRIA, a documentary directed by Janna Kyllästinen and produced by Kati Aho, is currently in production.