Essays by Dietmar Elger, Oliver Koerner von Gustorf and Bernadette Walter. Interview by Dirk Dobke with Dorothy Iannone.

For 31 years, artists Dieter Roth and Dorothy Iannone conducted a love affair through letters, postcards, telegrams, notes, poems, and texts, and through the works of art they made for and about each other. Completely open and trusting, their intelligent, honest correspondence, reproduced here chronologically, tells their story in a form much like that of a novel.

For over five decades, Dorothy Iannone has been making exuberantly sexual and joyfully transgressive image-text works. Karen Rosenberg wrote of her in The New York Times: "High priestess, matriarch, sex goddess: the self-taught American artist Dorothy Iannone has been called all these things and more. Since the early 1960s she has been making paintings, sculptures and artist's books that advocate 'ecstatic unity,' most often achieved through lovemaking." Beginning with the famous "An Icelandic Saga," in which Iannone narrates her journey to Iceland (where she meets Dieter Roth and leaves her husband to live with him), this singular volume traces Iannone's search for "ecstatic unity" from its carnal beginnings in her relationships with Roth and other men into its spiritual incarnation as she becomes a practicing Buddhist. Reproducing several previously unpublished or long-out-of-print works in their entirety (such as Danger in Düsseldorf, The Whip, "An Explosive Interlude"), as well as longer excerpts from rarely-seen works like A Cookbook and Berlin Beauties, this volume gives readers the chance to read her work with sustained attention, and enjoy the sophistication of the stories she tells and the visual-textual embellishments that make them so irresistible. Associated with Fluxus through her close friendships with Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou and Ben Vautier, as well as most well-known for her relationship with Dieter Roth, Dorothy Iannone (born 1933) nevertheless has her own distinct aesthetic style and substantive concerns. Her first major museum show in the U.S. came when she was 75 in 2008 at the New Museum, shortly after her "orgasm box" titled "I Was Thinking of You" was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2006, and she has recently attained more recognition with solo shows at the Camden Arts Centre, Palais de Tokyo and the Berlinischer Galerie.

Since the 1960s, Dorothy Iannone has attempted to represent ecstatic love, 'the union of gender, feeling, and pleasure.' Today her oeuvre 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, political and feminist issues.A narrative element fed with personal mythologies, experiences, feelings, and relationships runs through all of her work, unified by her distinctive colourful, explicit, and comic book-like style.Created in 1969, when she was living with Swiss artist Dieter Roth, the Cookbook is a perfect example of how she mixes daily life and an existential approach, culminating in her vision of cooking as an outlet for both eroticism and introspection. A real book of recipes full of visual delights, the Cookbook contains densely decorated pages with patterned designs, packed text, and vibrant colours. Personal sentences are interspersed among the lists of ingredients, revealing the exultations and tribulations of her life between the lines of recipes.Filled with wit and wordplay, associations between aliments and idiosyncratic thoughts -- 'At least one can turn pain to colour' accompanies the recipe for gazpacho; 'Dorothy's spirit is like this: green and yellow', is written next to the ingredients for lentil soup -- the Cookbook constitutes a mundane but essential self-portrait of the artist as a cook and a lover. This beautiful facsimile of the Cookbook is published in collaboration with Air de Paris, Paris.Born in 1933 in Boston, Dorothy Iannone lives and works in Berlin. Her recent exhibitions include: Centre culturel suisse, Paris, 2016; Migros Museum, Zurich; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (both 2014); and New Museum, New York, 2009.

Publié à l'occasion de l'exposition éponyme au Frac Bretagne, Rennes, de décembre 2013 à mars 2014.00Tout au long d'une oeuvre fondamentalement en mouvement, Dieter Roth, ayant vécu toute sa vie entre plusieurs pays, en particulier l'Allemagne, la Suisse et l'Islande, a mis en place des modes opératoires destinés à générer des formes. Dans les années 1950 et 1960, après une formation en Suisse marquée par l'art concret, il développe un travail géométrique d'inspiration constructiviste et typographique. Parallèlement, on assiste chez lui à la destruction de toute tentative formelle. Dans les années 1960, il réalise sa première " île ", amas de matières informes vouées à se dégrader avec le temps, inaugurant une dynamique de construction-destruction récurrente.

A superb facsimile of Dorothy Ianonne's 1970 comic-book tale of censorship, sexuality and female autonomy As much as Love and Eros have defined my work since its beginnings, so too has censorship, or its shadow, accompanied it," recalls Dorothy Iannone (born 1933) in her introduction to this facsimile publication of her legendary The Story of Bern, [or] Showing Colors. First published by Iannone and her then companion Dieter Roth in 1970, in an edition of 500, the book documents the censorship of Iannone's work The (Ta)Rot Pack (1968-69) and the subsequent removal of all his works by Roth, from a collective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern. For his exhibition titled Freunde, Friends, d'Fründe, legendary curator Harald Szeemann invited Karl Gerstner, Roth, Daniel Spoerri and André Thomkins to exhibit artist friends; Roth chose Iannone. The censorship of Iannone, and Roth's protest, eventually led to Harald Szeemann's resignation as the director of the institution. Telling the story of this act of censorship as well as the context of the exhibition in Bern and its iteration in a non-censored version in Düsseldorf, The Story of Bern is emblematic of Iannone's distinctive, explicit and comic-book style, and of her openness about sexuality and the strengthening of female autonomy.