From October 23, 2026, to February 21, 2027, the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT will present the first retrospective of the artist in Germany.

In around 100 works—including paintings, drawings, photographs, costumes, masks, and books—the exhibition offers a comprehensive insight into her fascinating oeuvre. Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Trieste, the self-taught artist remained independent throughout her life despite her proximity to the Surrealist movement. Influenced by the Renaissance, Symbolism, German Romanticism, and Magical Realism, Fini developed a distinctive visual language that fluidly moved between dream, myth, fantasy, and theatrical staging.

Through her signature style reminiscent of old master painting, she created dreamlike scenes featuring priestesses, sphinxes, and hybrid beings who subvert traditional gender roles. Powerful portrayals of women and androgynous figures emerge, often as reinterpretations of historical archetypes. Emancipation, gender fluidity, eros, occultism, death, and transformation are among the themes that recur throughout her work, along with her playful engagement with masks, costumes, and gender roles. Central to her art is the exploration of her position as a woman and artist. From the outset, Fini confidently presented herself as free-spirited and glamorous, deliberately blurring the boundaries between artistic creation and lived existence.

The exhibition traces her extraordinary artistic development through works spanning seven decades.

The SCHIRN’s retrospective is organized primarily by theme, beginning with photographic portraits of the artist and painted self-portraits. Leonor Fini is one of the most photographed female artists of the twentieth century, with images taken by her friends Dora Maar, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Brassaï. Few other women painters examined their own identity as intensively as Fini. She adopted multiple roles throughout her life to reveal different facets of her expressive personality. In the process, she frequently mined myth and drew heavily on the European art historical tradition for her imagery. Animals recur throughout her work, as in “Autoportrait au hibou” (“Self-Portrait with Owl”, 1936), one of her earliest self-portraits, in which she portrays herself with an owl, a symbol of wisdom and alchemy. Fini’s “Autoportrait au scorpion (Self-Portrait with Scorpion)” was displayed in the 21st Venice Biennale in 1938. Hybrid beings—in particular the figure of the sphinx as the artist’s alter ego—also appear in numerous works, including “La Bergère des sphinx” (“The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes”, 1941) and “Stryges Amaouri” (1947). As an autonomous female subject, the sphinx embodies power, knowledge, and self-determination. Fini repeatedly inverted traditional gendered power relations, painting strong women who watch over sleeping, naked men, or guide them.

In Fini’s oeuvre, wise women repeatedly appear as alchemists, spiritual guides, seers, or weavers of fate. Within the imaginary visual worlds created by the artist, these female figures occupy a central position: As bearers of creative and transformative powers, they seem to govern the cycles of nature—and thus also those of life and death. Some perform mysterious rituals, as in “Les Fileuses (The Spinners)”, while others wield alchemical symbols, such as the egg in “La Gardienne des phénix (The Guardian of the Phoenixes)”, both from 1954.

Death and transience pervade numerous works by Fini. This most often takes the form of skeletons and bones, but it also crops up through sleeping bodies as well as references to the traditions of the memento mori and the danse macabre. The androgynous skeletal figure in “L’Ange de l’anatomie” (“The Angel of Anatomy”, 1949) testifies to Fini’s enduring fascination with anatomy; at the same time, she is presented as an elegant figure with a cloak and wings, rendered in an old master style. “Sphinx Regina / Sphinx reine” (“Sphinx Queen”, 1943) depicts a decomposing sphinx in a mysterious, morbid landscape suspended between destruction and rejuvenation. Death becomes part of a personal mythology, appearing less as something to be frightened of than the bringer of a fascinating metamorphosis, or as a friend and powerful ally.

An exhibition by the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT in cooperation with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris – Paris Musées.