“Italian fury, scandalous elegance, caprice and passion".
Max Ernst
Max Ernst defined her as an “Italian fury” of “scandalous elegance, caprice and passion." The Argentine-Italian Leonor Fini (1907-1996) was indeed a femme fatale of undeniable charm and turbulent temperament. She was a hardly classifiable artist because of the unicity of her vision and her independence from the main artistic trends of the twentieth century. She was the center of her own life, surrounded by a myriad of satellites gravitating around her: numerous friends and many amis amoreuses, as she used to call her lovers.
The exhibition Leonor Fini. Italian Fury offers a reading of Fini’s oeuvre in the light of some of these relationships, presenting over forty of her works in dialogue with pieces by artists who played a pivotal role in her life and career: the Surrealist painter and former consul Stanislao Lepri (1905-1996) – one of Fini’s long-lasting partners – her lover and then friend Max Ernst (1891-1976), his wife Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), and the friends Fabrizio Clerici (1913-1993) and Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978).
Years after executing the works An Embroidered Triology (1999) and Enjoy the New Fragrance (Leonor Fini for Greed), the artist Francesco Vezzoli returns once again to think about the persona and the life of Leonor Fini with five new works executed for the occasion. These will be presented in a spectacular exhibition design, conceived by Filippo Bisagni, where elements of Lepri’s painting La Chambre de Leonor (1969) will come alive guiding the visitors into the discovery of Fini’s realm.
