Free Love and Sexuality by Dorothy Iannone

For six decades, the US artist Dorothy Iannone (*1933) has developed and cultivated an epic and very personal visual language. Drawing on her own life and a wealth of historical references, she pays tribute in her works to free love, ecstasy and the lustful as well as spiritual encounter between lovers. The Danish Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk is dedicating an extensive exhibition to the artist from 25 May to 11 September. Freedom, free love, liberated sexuality and ecstatic union with the other are central themes in the show of works entitled Dorothy Iannone. The themes are based on Iannone's explicitly autobiographical and erotic images. They are often strongly reminiscent of graphic novels. Handwritten texts and images complement each other to tell a story, blunt and humorous, peppered with verbal and visual details. Since the 1960s, Iannone has thus developed a colourful, ornamental visual language that, in addition to paintings and drawings, also unfolds in books and video sculptures, among other things.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1933, Dorothy Iannone is a painter, graphic artist, object and video artist. Her personal experiences and love stories form an essential source material for her works. She combines these with a solid foundation of mythological and historical representations of relationships and gender, love, sex and ecstasy. In doing so, Iannone draws from a wide variety of sources: They range from antiquity and Icelandic sagas to Christianity, the Baroque and Indian tantra to world literature and film history.