GROUP EXHIBITION

On the first floor of the gallery’s storied Mayfair townhouse (formerly the Empress Club), La mort de l’amour features important paintings by Fini and Waliszewska in dialogue. On the ground floor, Ménage à trois presents Fini and Waliszewska alongside Stanislao Lepri (1905–1980), whose work expands on their shared themes while also constituting a meaningful connection to Fini. Lepri was one of Fini’s two great loves, and she lived with him in a polyamorous relationship for four decades.

Unveiling never-before-exhibited paintings by Waliszewska and masterworks from Fini’s career, La mort de l’amour considers a mutual visual universe wherein love and death, seduction and danger, entwine in luminous, unsettling compositions. Symbolic objects—skulls, bones, and flowers, among other things—recur among ephemeral nudes, ghostly wanderers, prone dreamers, and feline companions. A highlight of the exhibition is Fini’s Paravent / Metamorphosis / Quatre squelettes of 1974, a polyptych in which luxuriously berobed skeletons engage in a flamboyant danse macabre. Also on view is the artist’s Les Sorcières / Composition (1959), a spectacular scene of witches soaring through a crimson space, and La Rosée (1963), which ensconces the faces of a woman and several cats in a kaleidoscopic play of greens. A glowing 2024 canvas by Waliszewska likewise shows cats enfolded within an opulent and hazy setting— the animals becoming anthropomorphized and imposing, at once benign and disquieting.

In Ménage à trois, viewers are greeted by a new, large-scale painting by Waliszewska picturing a triumphant female nude and two Sphinx-like creatures. This work leads into a salon-style presentation of paintings, gouaches, watercolors, and drawings that demonstrate Fini’s and Waliszewska’s manifold portrayals of powerful and emboldened women. Here, figures are transported into chimerical surroundings or transformed into otherworldly beings. Rarely seen works by Stanislao Lepri adds the third presence in Ménage à trois. A long-term partner of Fini, alongside Polish essayist and critic Konstanty Jeleński (1922–1987), Lepri developed his oeuvre in tandem with Fini, the two inspiring and supporting each other. His hauntingly beautiful works, including the 1977 canvas L’apprentissage, share numerous points of connection with both Fini and Waliszewska, merging the macabre with tender delicacies of touch and detail.

These presentations crucially underscore the agency of two women artists whose iconographies center on female desire and human mortality. Organized by Victoria Gelfand-Magalhaes (President, Europe) and curated by feminist art historian Alison M. Gingeras, La mort de l’amour and Ménage à trois invite viewers to witness a transgressive dialogue that blurs the boundaries between reality, fantasy, and delirium.