For six decades, Dorothy Iannone has developed and cultivated an imagery that is epic and intensely personal. Based on her own life and a wealth of historical references, she pays homage to free love, ecstasy and the both pleasurable and spiritual encounter between lovers.
Freedom, free love, liberated sexuality and the ecstatic union with the other are central themes in Dorothy Iannone’s explicitly autobiographical and explicitly erotic images. Since the 1960s, the artist (born in 1933) has developed a colorful, ornamental imagery that unfolds in paintings, drawings, books, video sculptures and more.
Often her works bear a close resemblance to graphic novels. Hand-lettered texts and images work together to tell the story, bluntly and with humour invested in verbal and visual details.
Dorothy Iannone
FROM ANTIQUITY TO HER OWN LIFE
Dorothy Iannone’s personal experiences and love stories constitute an essential raw material for the works. But the autobiographical depictions are based on a solid foundation of mythological and historical depictions of relationships and gender, love, sex and ecstasy. Here, Iannone draws on references ranging from antiquity, Icelandic sagas, Christianity and Baroque to Indian tantra, world literature and film history.
Dorothy Iannone was born in the US in 1933 but has lived and worked in Europe since 1967. From 1976 she has been based in Berlin.
