Love Is Forever, Isn’t It?

Published to accompany Dorothy Iannone’s retrospective exhibition held at M KHA (Antwerp) in 2023–2024, this publication sheds new light on the legendary artist’s practice by dealing specifically with her idiosyncratic take on performativity and transdisciplinarity—notably through her use of audio and video pieces, and creative writing—and her unique thinking and imagery regarding feminism and feminine sexuality and desire. New essays by American curator Alison Gingeras, French curator and academic Ana Mendoza Aldana, and M KHA curator Joanna Zielinska, together with a selection of rarely reproduced bodies of work—especially the “People” series (1966–1968)—offer new approaches to celebrate her work and life.

For more than six decades, Dorothy Iannone (1933, Boston–2022, Berlin) attempted to represent ecstatic love, the union of gender, feeling, and pleasure. Today her oeuvre, which encompasses painting, drawing, collage, video, sculpture, objects, and artist’s books, is widely recognized as one of the most provocative and fruitful bodies of work in recent decades in terms of the liberalization of female sexuality, and political and feminist issues. As Fluxus artist Robert Filliou declared as early as in 1972, “She is a freedom fighter, and a forceful and dedicated artist, skillfully blending imagery and text, beauty and truth. Her aim is no less than human liberation.” A narrative element fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships runs through all of her work, unified by her distinctive colorful, explicit, and comic book style.

Active from the 1960s to the early 2020s, her work has been recently exhibited at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2022); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); the Serpentine Pavilion, London (2018); the Swiss Cultural Center, Paris (2016); MAMCO, Geneva (2017); the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunt, Zurich, and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2014); the New Museum, New York (2009).