Artist: Leonor Fini

‘The Sphinx is the guardian of the threshold. She represents the marriage of the cerebral and the instinctive, the human and the animal. She is the 'in-between' state where all transformations are possible.’
- Leonor Fini, Le Livre de Leonor Fini: Peintures, dessins, écrits (Lausanne: Edita S.A., 1975)

This exhibition situates thirty graphic works by Leonor Fini within a trans-temporal dialogue with Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and African ritual objects, foregrounding a shared language of metamorphosis and spiritual agency. Fini’s world of sphinxes, feline priestesses, and androgynous seers intersects with African masks, reliquaries, and ancestral effigies inviting a reading of the body as conduit, an instrument of transformation between visible and invisible realms.

At the centre of the exhibition lies the continuum between mask and gaze, where concealment functions as revelation and identity assumes a ritual dimension. In this context, Fini’s personal mythology is brought into dialogue with the operative power of African figures and the enduring symbolic charge of antiquity, emphasising the image as a talismanic and active presence. In both Fini’s practice and the ritual use of masks and figures across these cultures, the act of appearance is inherently performative: a form of theatre in which identity is assumed, enacted, and transformed.

Furthermore, the exhibition delves into sacred eroticism as a vital force. Fini’s dominant female figures and priestesshoods, asserting eroticism as command, resonate with the fertility and ancestral forces embedded in African forms, where sexuality is integrated with protection and continuity. This convergence highlights the body as a ritual site of power.

This curatorial framework reveals a shared totemic feminine, a personal pantheon of protective presences and ancestral sovereignty across cultures and centuries.