Dorothy Iannone

Key works and writings from six decades of pioneering image-text works in celebration of Eros

For six decades, Dorothy Iannone (born 1933) has developed an iconography that is at once epic and intensely personal. Often her works bear a close resemblance to graphic novels: hand-lettered texts and images work together to tell the story, bluntly and with humor in both verbal and visual details. Liberated sexuality and romantic relations are central themes. Iannone's erotic scenes stem from historical representations of ecstatic unions across times, cultures and religions, with references to antiquity, Greek vases, Egyptian art, Roman and Pompeian murals, the Kama Sutra and Tantra, Icelandic sagas, Christianity, Buddhism, world literature and film history. Serving as muses, the artist's lovers appear in her narratives: several works feature the artist Dieter Roth, who was Iannone's partner from 1967 to 1974. This richly illustrated catalog presents some of the artist's most important work, alongside an introduction by Italian art historian Barbara Casavechia, the artist's own writing and an illustrated biography.