Recently, I was fortunate enough to tour the Soho loft of late Finnish-American artist Iria Leino. She lived there for decades, refusing a million-dollar buyout and innumerable other landlord attempts at getting her out of the rent-stabilized loft. The quantity of work in the space left the greatest impression on me. There was so much of it — in spite of some which had already been removed for exhibitions that were on view at the time. She was an archivist, not a minimalist; paintings were labeled with titles, her name, and the year they were made. She lived there too, but space overtaken by artmaking and storage dominated the apartment. Just one small room remained for non-artmaking living, though even that space was stacked with materials.
The gallerist guiding our tour talked about the proportion of work in the apartment that was showable — paintings that were not just finished but also representative of the higher quality of her creative prowess. (That is, paintings that are sellab…