Dorothy Iannone

Dorothy Iannone (1933-2022) is best known for her exuberantly transgressive, sexually explicit, mostly autobiographical image and text works exploring “ecstatic unity.” Iannone was born in Boston, MA where she attended Boston University and Brandeis University majoring in literature and currently lives and works in Berlin. She began painting in 1959 and traveled extensively with her husband James Upham in Europe and Asia. From 1963 until 1967, they ran a cooperative gallery in New York, and in 1966 they live for some months in the South of France, where Iannone began a close friendship with Robert Filliou and other artists from Fluxus community. On a trip to Iceland in 1967, she met and fell in love with German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth, and they lived together in different European cities until 1974. In 1976, Iannone moved to Berlin after receiving a grant from the DAAD Berlin Artists’ Program, where she has lived ever since. Solo exhibitions of Iannone’s work have been held at the New Museum, New York (2009), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2006) and Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2005). Her work was included in the 4th Berlin Biennial in 2006, curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. She has produced numerous artist books and is the subject of several monographs including Dorothy Iannone: This Sweetness Outside of Time (2014); Dorothy Iannone: Censorship and the Irrepressible Drive Toward Love and Divinity (2015) and Dorothy Iannone: A Cookbook (2019). Iannone’s work is held in significant international collections, including at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.