Dorothy Iannone
Made explicit, ecstatic, autobiographical work for fifty years and was censored for most of them.
Dorothy Iannone was born in Boston in 1933, sued the United States government in 1961 to overturn the ban on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and won. In 1967 she met Dieter Roth in Iceland, left her husband, and made him the subject of a decade of work chronicling their relationship in flat, patterned, brilliantly coloured pictures full of text, in which genitals are drawn as plainly as faces. Her work was censored at Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 — Harald Szeemann resigned over it — and she was not given a substantial retrospective until she was in her seventies. She died in Berlin in 2022.
The market has developed almost entirely since 2009 and remains comparatively young, with strong institutional interest driving it. Unique works on paper and on board in gouache, acrylic and collage are the core, alongside painted objects, boxes and the artist's books, of which there are many. Iannone's surfaces are matt and heavily worked in water-based media and are light-sensitive. Editions and prints exist in modest numbers, mostly recent. The Air de Paris and Peres Projects exhibition record is the usual reference point for provenance.
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