Harper’s is pleased to announce Iria Leino: In Two Parts—The Suomen Suo and Colorfield Series. These back-to-back presentations at Harper’s Chelsea 512 survey works by Iria Leino created between the late 1960s and mid-1970s. Her breakthrough Suomen Suo series of 1974, shown for the first time, opens Thursday, September 4, 6–8pm, and runs through October 4. The second exhibition, on view October 8 through November 8, features newly discovered paintings from Leino’s Colorfield series, made between 1967 and 1969. In addition, selections from her Buddhist Rain series will be featured at Frieze Masters in London, October 15–19. Iria Leino: In Two Parts continues the gallery’s commitment to unveiling the historic oeuvre of a reclusive artist whose vision helped shape the visual language of her era—only now coming fully to light.
Paintings from Leino’s Suomen Suo series will debut in a gallery setting for the first time on September 4. Posthumously titled by the artist’s estate, the name roughly translates from Finnish as “the marshes of Finland.” Her journals and frequent travels to her homeland make clear that the region’s natural environment was a primary inspiration for this body of work. Created entirely in 1974 and locked in storage since, the Suomen Suo series marks a highly productive period in which Leino fully explored the formal possibilities of her new style.
Continuing her commitment to painting without a brush, Leino harnessed gravity to shape her compositions. For one year, the artist focused her forceful splashing and pouring techniques at the center of the canvas, concentrating visual energy inward rather than dispersing it toward the edges of the picture plane. At times, as in Water Leaf, she let layers dry before applying the next; at others, she worked wet-on-wet to achieve fluid, organic blends, as in Noah’s Ark. Many of her colors recall Finland’s spring thaw, when mineral-rich bogs interlace with pools of water and moss carpets the rocky outcrops; simultaneously, the energy of her marks evoke the flowing rapids of the Iijoki and Vaikkojoki Rivers carving through the countryside.
Although Leino purposely limited her engagements with the commercial gallery system, she was no stranger to the art of her time. She sought to make rigorous paintings that expanded the dialogue of what became known as “post-painterly abstraction,” pursuing new ways for the medium to advance its own history. Her commitment to the pressing aesthetic questions of the 1960s and 70s underscores her restless intellect and willingness to experiment with multiple styles throughout her lifetime. While remaining faithful to acrylic pigment and a brushless approach, Leino introduced unorthodox methods of paint application, much like her closest teacher, Larry Poons, and contemporaries such as Jack Whitten, Kenneth Noland, and Morris Louis. A notable technical parallel also exists between Leino’s Suomen Suo series and Pat Steir’s Waterfall paintings, where fluid streams cascade down the canvas. Remarkably, Leino pioneered this embrace of paint’s liquid nature more than fifteen years before Steir, as if carrying on a silent conversation with contemporaries who had yet to arrive.
Her affinity with Morris Louis is equally instructive, particularly in their shared emphasis on flatness and color saturation. Like Louis, Leino’s pre-1974 paintings allowed sprayed and stained surfaces to seep into the weave of the canvas, producing wafer-thin, continuous planes. These effects are especially evident in her Colorfield paintings, which will be featured in the October exhibition. With the Suomen Suo series, however, she became preoccupied with building up pigment until the surfaces acquired a distinct tactile dimensionality. This shift became more pronounced in her later bodies of work, yet it was the Suomen Suo paintings that catalyzed the working method that would define her mature period.
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 exhibition illuminates Leino’s legacy and affirms the 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. IRIA, a documentary directed by Janna Kyllästinen and produced by Kati Aho, is currently in production.