What a discovery! How could such a talent have remained hidden for so long? Born in 1932 in Finland, Iria Leino studied at Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts, moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, and then to NYC in 1966, where she studied with, among others, Larry Poons at the Art Students League, and made vibrant Abstract Expressionist paintings. A solo exhibition catapulted her into the spotlight, landing her an interview on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, and making a successful career seem inevitable. But in 1968 she suffered a traumatic brain injury that led her to Buddhism, a rejection of the material world, and an embrace of a hermetic life of art. In Paris, she’d supported her art as a glamorous fashion model, which enabled her to buy property that she rented to barely support herself throughout her NYC years, as she focused on art and shunned the commercial world. It is her Buddhist practice that we sense in the large, wispy paintings from the 1970s that are now on view at Harper’s through Oct. 19. Apparently, Leino would chant before working in the studio, and we feel the trance she put herself in. These paintings breathe us into their unearthly worlds of glowing color and unnamable textures, where the pure light of sensation has descended, as if the canvases have been absorbed into spirit and air. First staining by spraying, pouring, and splattering acrylic paint, she sometimes then added pastel to create a patterned mesh of light hovering just above the intangible surfaces. At their second Chelsea gallery, Harper’s presents Leino’s later work, which appears as a complete departure from the earlier paintings but may not fundamentally be so different. Street debris such as a fallen wall, door knob, mirror, fish-tank pebbles, plumbing and electrical elements, are embedded into acrylic medium, paint, and marble dust, to create relief sculpture-paintings that turn heartless man-made objects into emotional organic meditations of natural growth, inner light, and magical meditation.