Dorothy Iannone
Dorothy Iannone’s artistic project has a profoundly spiritual dimension and is the expression of a practice that sees art as a way of life, where it is both the reflection and the driving force of all things.
The “Majestic Chair” comes from a series of furniture drawings from 1976. An armchair and a stool were made at the time from two of these drawings. Remaining unique, they nevertheless attest to the artist’s early desiré to materialize.
Fully valorizing the decorative dimension omnipresent in Iannone’s graphic work, the Majestic Chair also reflects his stakes in ambiguity and fluidity: motif/surface, furniture/sculpture or substance/form. Remaining close to the design of Dorothy Iannone’s sculptural objects the Majestic Chair is hand-painted.
This edition of 10 is made possible by the association of two publishers who have already collaborated closely with Dorothy Iannone, WE DO NOT WORK ALONE and Editions Sylvain Courbois.
Biography
The artist was born in Boston in 1933 and died in Berlin in 2022. She graduated from Boston University in 1957 with a B.A. in American Literature. She then studied English literature at Brandeis University. In 1958, she married the painter James Upham and moved to New York. In 1959, she began painting.
« Iannone resists any kind of expectation with joyful gusto, disobeys every authority (except those she gleefully submits to), redefines her place in the world by creating an ever-expanding field of possibilities in that world-possibilities that arise as she turns everything inside out.
These reversals abound in Iannone’s work, whether through inversion (and merging) of male and female, muse and maker, sacred and profane, celestial and carnal, submission and dominance, compliment and insult, humor and earnestness. Nothing is quite as it seems, or wholly one thing or another. »
These words from Lisa Pearson about the work of Dorothy Iannone shed light on the collaboration carried out since 2018 and initiated by the design of the Forever True lamp.