Female Surrealists are having a moment in the sun. Not that Leonor Fini wanted to be considered a Surrealist, or a female artist for that matter. “She would say: ‘I am a painter, that’s enough’,” says Arlette Souhami, the owner of the Paris-based Galerie Minksy, who first met the Argentinian-born Fini in 1978.
To mark the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, at Frieze Masters the gallery is showing a group of paintings by Fini and her partner Stanislao Lepri, with whom she lived, together with the writer Constantin Jelenski from the 1950s onwards. “It was a very modern arrangement,” Souhami says. Key among the paintings on show at the fair is a tender self-portrait that Fini painted in 1942-43 of her and Lepri, which is being shown in London before travelling to Milan for Fini’s largest ever survey, at the Palazzo Reale in February 2025. The canvas is the most expensive at Souhami’s stand, valued at £1.65m (prices start at £150,000). Two works had sold at the time of writing.
Souhami notes how the market for Fini’s work has grown “slowly but surely” since her death in 1996 but has really taken off over the past few years. On 9 October, Christie’s in London sold an enigmatic oil painting from 1978 for £907,200 (with fees) against a high estimate of £650,000. Galerie Minksy is presenting works by Fini in its Paris venue throughout Art Basel Paris next week and has also loaned two pieces to the major Surrealism exhibition currently at the Pompidou Centre. Reflecting a growing tendency, the Paris show restores to view neglected female artists including Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Dora Maar.