"For Fini, art and life were inextricable, knit together by an abiding interest in the performance of self, nonnormative conceptions of gender and sexuality, and transformation." —Cassie Packard, Artforum

Over the course of seven decades, Leonor Fini produced an extensive body of work encompassing paintings, drawings, book illustrations, and set and costume design for theater, ballet, opera, and film. Today, she is regarded as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, widely celebrated for developing a visual language untethered to contemporaneous styles or movements, one distinctly the artist's own. The inversion of traditional gender roles occupies a principal force in Fini's oeuvre, and the figure of the sphinx-a mythical creature combining the head of a woman, often the artist's, with the body of a lion-most powerfully embodies her proclamations of female sexuality, desire, and agency.

Born in Buenos Aires to Italian parents, Leonor Fini quickly moved to Trieste, Italy, where her mother fled her oppressive father within eighteen months of Fini's birth. Following a kidnapping attempt orchestrated by her father, Fini began disguising as a boy in public, birthing a lifelong fascination with masquerade and an aura of mystique that would later become a touchstone of her artistic practice. In her teenage years, Fini suffered from an illness which left her eyes bandaged for two months, catalyzing the evolution of an artistic lexicon drawn from dreams, the imagination, and the human psyche. With no formal training, Fini soon began exhibiting in group exhibitions in Trieste and Milan, where she discovered the Italian Mannerists. She began receiving commissions for portraits at this time, a genre for which Fini would later become renowned with examples depicting such artists, writers, and public figures as Leonora Carrington, Lady Diana Cooper, Jean Genet, Meret Oppenheim, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, among many others. 

In 1931, Fini moved to Paris at the advice of the artist Giorgio de Chirico, who introduced her to the Surrealists. Disavowing the misogyny of the group's leader, André Breton, Fini boldly rejected an invitation to formally join the Surrealist group, though she continued to exhibit and socialize with such figures as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Georges Bataille, Leonora Carrington, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Meret Oppenheim, among many others. Fini's first solo exhibition in Paris was mounted in 1932 at the Galerie Bonjean, where Christian Dior then served as director. Her work soon rose to prominence following her inclusion in the pivotal exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1936, the same year she began exhibiting with the New York-based gallerist and champion of Surrealist art Julien Levy. Fini's creative output had already begun to surpass the boundaries of the visual arts by this time, and she notably designed the bottle and packaging of Elsa Schiaparelli's perfume called Shocking in 1937. Fini's extravagant and eccentric dresses embellished with masks and ripped clothing, often captured in photographs by Lee Miller and Dora Maar, would also launch Fini into a well-recognized fashion icon.