Exploring the artist Leonor Fini’s (1907-1996) self-fashioning and dressing-up practices in light of recent theories of performativity, Andrea 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 multi-sensory methodology, Kollnitz explore Fini's personal theatricality, photographic self-portraits and self-transformative, gender-bending, 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, Becoming Leonor Fini, 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.