Professor Andrea Kollnitz, 'Becoming Leonor Fini'

'Becoming Leonor Fini – Theatrical Self-Performances between Art and Life'

Exploring the artist Leonor Fini’s (1907-1996) self-fashioning and dressing-up practices in light of recent theories of performativity, Professor Kollnitz's presentation highlights how Fini's extension of artistic creative practices - from painted artworks to her self-creation through costumes, masks and fashion - allowed her to become a living artwork to be created and recreated on daily basis. Applying a multisensory methodology, Kollnitz explores Fini's personal theatricality, photographic self-portraits and self-transformative, genderbending, transgressive dressing-up games in relation to surrealist practices, showcasing the hybrid identities that made up Fini's overall character. Based on her recently published book, in three thematic sections Kollnitz highlights Fini’s theatrical performances at balls, her self-fashioning and self-promotion as an extraordinary artist in photographic and painted portraits, and her becoming-other through dressing-up, thus charting the artist's personal and creative development, the interaction between her paintings and self-creation and her increasing self-empowerment through sartorial means. As Kollnitz argues, Fini’s/the artist’s self-fashioning must be understood as a substantial creative practice developing and confirming artistic and personal autonomy and pointing to an extended concept of art where creation and self-creation powerfully enable each other.

Andrea Kollnitz is Professor in Art History and Head of the Art History Department at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. Her research focuses on art and nationalism; art- and fashion discourses during the early 20th century; the Nordic avant-garde from transnational perspectives; the self-fashioning of avant-garde artists. Kollnitz is co-editor of the books Fashion and Modernism (Bloomsbury 2018), A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, vol 2: 1925-1950 (Brill, 2019), Fashion, Performance & Performativity (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is currently leading a research project on Surrealism in Sweden and has recently published her monograph Becoming Leonor Fini: Theatrical Self-Performances between Art and Life at Bloomsbury Visual Arts (2025).

The research seminar will take place from 4.30pm in the Melville Room, in the Gilbert Scott Building at the University of Glasgow. Drinks will be served.

Organisers: Professor Stephen Forcer (SMLC), Dr Erica O'Neill (Social and Political Sciences), and Dr Debbie Lewer (Art History).

Chair: Dr Erica O'Neill.

Thanks to the University of Glasgow CIVIS team for generous sponsorship of the occasion https://www.gla.ac.uk/explore/internationalisation/civis/

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Melville Room (Room 435), Gilbert Scott Building, University of Glasgow, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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