L’Essayage IV, painted in 1985, is an iconic and provocative stat.mes nt by Leonor Fini; an act in which she expresses her highly original vision, powerful self-expression and fierce independence. Her protagonist defies normative roles — both of traditional society and of the artistic movements Fini is associated with.

Moving from Buenos Aires to Paris at just 24 years old, Fini found herself at the center of the city’s bohemian art society, surrounded by all of the surrealists - de Chirico, Picasso, Elouard, Dalí and Ernst. Fini was too independent to ever join them formally, rejecting Andre Breton’s misogynist views, and challenging attempts at subjugating women to the roles of muse, lover and mirror of male desire. By placing women at the center of her compositions, Fini developed a distinctive body of work defined by an adamantly feminist sensibility.

Fini was a self-taught artist; she had no formal artistic training, but she was technically and impeccably skilled. This is perhaps tied to Fini’s rebellious but curious childhood, when she spent lengths of t.mes in her uncle’s vast library, the local natural history museum and the morgue, where she would create anatomy sketches of the cadavers, a feature which became central to her mature creative output. Her figures with elongated limbs and facial features remind us of some of the Renaissance or Mannerism art, also drawing the imagery of the symbolists and the works of Klimt, Schiele and Munch.

The use of cost.mes and masquerade served to expand Fini’s form of self, reflecting and merging her roles as muse and artist, blurring the social constructs of gender and tradition. Fini's affinity for elaborate cost.mes s and plumed masks established her as one of the leading personalities of the Parisian art world. In several paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, we see the process of masquerade, which is, in Fini’s work, a process of becoming, as feminine figures are measured and dressed up in gowns.As Claude Cahun evokes in her autobiography Aveux non avenus (1930) “Cost.mes is not simply superficial, extravagant attire; it’s the exterior evocation of internal self-invention. One does not reach the self by removing layers, but by adding them.” By reworking the “rituals of seduction” that masquerade represents and playing with the limitations of dichotomies, cost.mes s and masks serve to blur the boundaries between masculinity/femininity, living/dead and human/animal (Mandia 2020).