BERLIN.- The Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin has opened Dorothy Iannone: The Berlin Beauties. In Dialogue with Alejandra Pombo Su, a special presentation at the Gemäldegalerie that brings together two artists from different generations through drawing, performance, poetry, and the politics of the body.

On view through September 13, 2026, the cabinet exhibition centers on Dorothy Iannone’s drawing and text series The Berlin Beauties from 1977–78, held in the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett and now being presented in its entirety for the first time. The exhibition pairs Iannone’s work with a new drawing project and a performance created especially for the occasion by Galician artist Alejandra Pombo Su.

Across the decades, Iannone and Pombo Su are linked by a shared interest in corporeality, intimacy, vulnerability, and the strength that can emerge from forms of emotional and physical connection. Both artists work across media, yet drawing remains central to their practices as a way of opening fixed ideas to new perspectives.

Iannone created The Berlin Beauties shortly after moving from the United States to West Berlin, where she settled permanently in 1976 following an artist residency. The 70-part series combines intimate ink drawings with lyrical texts, forming what the museum describes as a drawn love poem. Through image and language, Iannone explores the everyday, spiritual, intellectual, and sexual dimensions of love and desire while asserting an autonomous female voice.

The beloved addressed in the work is an imagined figure inspired by Georges Jacques Danton, a central figure of the French Revolution who was executed by guillotine in 1794. Biographical references, however, suggest that Iannone’s male muse may have been the German Fluxus artist Dieter Roth. The work itself is dedicated to Mary Harding, a close friend of the artist who also collaborated with her on the project. Its subtitle reads: “You have no idea how beautiful you are, Berlin.”

The series combines black ink, traces of pencil, and occasional photographic elements on white drawing board. Iannone mounted pairs of sheets, each containing German and English versions of the same text, on black wooden panels. The works were published in 1978 as an artist’s book and entered the Kupferstichkabinett in 1988 through the Artists’ Support Program and the collecting activities of the State of Berlin.





This presentation marks Iannone’s first public showing in the museum and brings renewed attention to a body of work centered on female self-determination and sexual freedom. Throughout her career, Iannone repeatedly challenged prudery, hypocrisy, and social convention, often drawing on her American background to question who is included in the promise of liberty. In a screen-printed poster for a 1977 exhibition in West Berlin, for example, she referred to New York’s Statue of Liberty, expanding the symbol of democratic ideals into a broader question about freedom and its limits.

Alejandra Pombo Su’s contribution extends these concerns into a contemporary register. Currently a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, as Iannone was five decades before her, Pombo Su works between performance, poetry, video, sculpture, and drawing. During her year in Berlin, she has engaged with Iannone’s legacy while developing her own reflections on the relationship between human and animal life.

Her new work, A Year of Devotion, weaves human and animal forms into fluid constellations of bodies, environments, and materials. Butterfly wings, flower petals, rhinestones, and nail polish are embedded into layers of watercolor, creating an open structure of drawings, writing, and matter that invites viewers to connect, reorder, and rethink.

The exhibition also includes a performance component. On July 4, 2026, Pombo Su will present Under Honey, a site-specific voice performance developed for the Cranach Hall of the Gemäldegalerie. For the first time, she expands her solo performance practice through collaboration with a Berlin women’s choir, Feature Chor Berlin. The work explores the voice as vibration, something that can separate from the body and resonate with space, artworks, and audience.

The exhibition and its accompanying events form part of We the People, a program initiative by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation marking the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States. Through exhibitions, discussions, conferences, lectures, and workshops, the initiative highlights the many connections between the collections of its institutions and the history of America.

Dorothy Iannone: The Berlin Beauties. In Dialogue with Alejandra Pombo Su is curated by Nóra Lukács, curator of contemporary art at the Kupferstichkabinett. The exhibition is supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, with funds from the Federal Foreign Office and the Berlin Senate.