Dorothy Iannone

Since the early 1960s, American artist Dorothy Iannone (1933-2022) has occupied herself with the attempt to represent ecstatic love: “the union of gender, feeling and pleasure,” as she herself described it. Her oeuvre encompasses paintings, drawings, collages, video sculptures, objects, and publications. A narrative element, fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships, runs through all of her works. Particularly in her late figurative painting, which almost appears to dissolve into the ornamental, she created scenarios in symbolic settings, in which she also consistently celebrated a playful handling of the subject matter. Since the 1960s, this visual self-empowerment has been read as a contribution to the liberalization of female sexuality. On the other hand, Iannone, who took a spiritual, existential approach, has never seen herself as part of a feminist movement. However, in bringing her works to the public, she inevitably manifested a self-understanding through her handling of controversial subject matter.

See also Dieter Roth.