Open Secret: Iria Leino
— The Arts Club, London 25 January — 26 April 2026

Open Secret: Iria Leino, the centrepiece of the Arts Club’s winter programme, on view from 25 January 2026 to 26 April 2026. Displayed throughout the club’s Drawing and Ante Rooms, this landmark exhibition marks the first major presentation of Leino’s work in the United Kingdom. Open Secret offers audiences a rare encounter with the luminous, spiritually charged abstractions of a painter whose contributions to post-war American art are only now receiving overdue recognition. 

Born in Finland in 1932 and later based in New York until her passing in 2022, Iria Leino led an extraordinary life that bridged the worlds of art, fashion, and spiritual practice. After graduating from Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1955, she continued her training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where her striking presence attracted the attention of Madame Grès and Karl Lagerfeld, launching an international modelling career under the name IRIA. At The Art Students League, she studied under Larry Poons and developed a deeply personal form of lyrical abstraction, shaped by intuitive process, disciplined technique, and an expanding Buddhist faith. Working largely outside the commercial gallery system, she pursued art as a lifelong pathway toward spiritual insight. In 1964, at the height of this success, Leino abruptly left fashion to devote herself to painting, relocating to a SoHo loft that would remain her home and studio for nearly six decades. Her death revealed the full scope of her practice, almost 1,000 paintings and works on paper found in her SoHo loft, prompting her overdue entry into the art-historical canon.

Open Secret follows the development of Leino’s practice through three defining series. Her Colour Field Series (late 1960s), shaped within the second-generation New York School, showcases her refined control of soaked and stained acrylics on raw canvas, distinguished by sgraffito lines that carry subtle cosmological meaning. Works such as Gold Sparkle and Hevosen Kenkä (Horseshoe) exemplify the meditative depth of this period.

Leino’s conversion to Buddhism after a life-altering accident in 1968 catalysed the Buddhist Rain Series (early 1970s), built from thousands of rhythmic diagonal brushstrokes informed by chanting rituals; Guiding Angel is a key work. The exhibition also features three works on paper that merge the aesthetic of her Hands Series with a self-portrait of Iria taken by the legendary fashion photographer Harry Meerson in 1959. Iria translated the portrait into a kind of pointillist form, with the marks of the portrait almost lost under the layering of shapes, offering what could be described as a kind of obliteration of Iria’s past life and image, one that she repeatedly tried to distance herself from through her abstractions over the following decades. 

Together, these series illuminate Leino’s pioneering position within the evolution of post-war abstraction, alongside, yet distinct from, artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland. Her renewed recognition in recent years, following her passing in 2022, has seen her work enter major European and American collections, reaffirming her significance as a visionary painter of colour, rhythm, and the unseen.

Curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes of Wedel Art.

This exhibition was realised with the generous support of Larsen Warner Gallery and the Iria Leino Trust, whose loaned works played a vital role in bringing the project to life.