PARIS.- Upon learning of Dorothy Iannone's death, Bernard Blistène, honorary director of the Musée national d'art moderne, wrote:

Dorothy Iannone was born in Boston in 1933 and died, aged 89, in Berlin on December 26, 2022. An American citizen, throughout her life and work she never ceased her denunciations of her country's hypocrisy, and remains famous for having successfully sued the American government over its banning of Henrry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. A great traveler, she discovered the Far East and Japan, which became fertile sources of inspiration for her. Between 1963 and 1967 she ran the Stryke Gallery, an exhibition space on 10th Street in New York. After receiving a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst program in Berlin in 1976, she lived there for the rest of her life. For over fifty years she worked on the pioneering graphic and painterly approach that would become a model for feminism and the various forms of emancipation and social and political struggle of her time. She was one of the first to build a strongly narrative visual oeuvre, mixing often autobiographical texts, films and drawings, opposing all forms of censorship, and defending free love and autonomous female sexuality.

Going beyond her commitments, Iannone achieved a singular artistic plasticity which in some respects is reminiscent of the work of Niki de Saint-Phalle. But it was undoubtedly through the love that bound her to Dieter Roth, whom she met in Reykjavik in 1967, that her work took on a new dimension. Roth became her "muse" and appears in many of her works. His nickname for her was "Lioness". She said at the time that she and he had become "the stars of her work." There followed the cult book An Icelandic Saga (1978-86), a kind of Nordic epic recounting her love affair with Roth, together with paintings depicting sexual union and desire. Ianonne was in search of a psychic and physical union permeated with both Tantric and Buddhist influences. Beginning in the 1970s, her work was regularly exhibited and featured in numerous solo shows and retrospectives. Her last exhibition, Always Bold, conceived with Frédéric Paul, curator of the project, took place at the Centre Pompidou in 2019. "My encounter with Dorothy Iannone's work had convinced me that I had to get to know her. I was not disappointed! She was a luminous, funny being, with a necessary touch of insolence. I knew she had been a wonderful 'bad girl' and still was, just like the plastic works and environments she was still creating and that the Centre Pompidou has had the privilege of being able to acquire," Bernard Blistène said in a text he is preparing on the artist.