In Iria Leino’s art, the Finnish landscape is intertwined with a spiritual quest. Born in Helsinki and active as an artist in New York from the 1960s onward, Leino seamlessly incorporated imagery drawn from Finland’s lakes, forests and waterways, as well as from meditation and the avant-garde artist circles of SoHo.

In her work, Leino sought to preserve her Finnish heritage and connection to nature, fueled by her spiritual search in Buddhism. From pouring to paintings-as-sculpture is Leino’s first themed exhibition to explore the evolution and significance of her three-dimensional paintings. Her first posthumous exhibition in Finland, and her debut at Galerie Forsblom, took place in 2025, featuring the color-drenched works of the Elephant series.

Curated by art historian Peter Hastings Falk, this new exhibition focuses on Leino’s later oeuvre and her gradual transition from flat pictorial surfaces towards a more sculptural approach to painting.

The exhibition presents two series, Flat pours and Topographics. The latter is the more extensive, tracing Leino’s artistic development through two sub-series: Topographics by erosion and Heavy topographics.

The Flat pours series features irregular, narrow streaks of paint drizzled in dynamic vertical patterns and punctuated by controlled splashes. Its palette draws on the colors of Finland’s forests and the rugged beauty of its coastlines. From here, Leino moved deliberately towards greater three-dimensionality. In the Topographics series, she began embedding sand, pebbles and, later, a variety of found objects in increasingly thick layers of paint, creating vigorously sculpted surfaces reminiscent of terrain shaped by the forces of nature.

Galerie Forsblom’s exhibition pays tribute to this body of sculptural paintings, which Leino herself considered among her most significant artistic achievements. It also traces her artistic development towards a form of painting in which color, materiality, texture, and three-dimensionality become inextricably intertwined.