BERLIN.- Love, desire and freedom run through Dorothy Iannone's The Berlin Beauties, a deeply personal cycle of drawings and texts created soon after the American-born artist made West Berlin her home. Nearly half a century later, all 70 parts of the series have been brought together for the first time in a museum presentation, where Iannone's unabashed exploration of intimacy is being placed in conversation with a new generation.
Now on view at Berlin's Gemldegalerie through September 13, “Dorothy Iannone: The Berlin Beauties. In Dialogue with Alejandra Pombo Su” pairs Iannone's landmark 1977–78 series with new work by Galician artist Alejandra Pombo Su. The exhibition is a special presentation of the Kupferstichkabinett, which has held The Berlin Beauties in its collection since 1988.
At first glance, The Berlin Beauties can feel like an illustrated love letter. Iannone combines black ink, traces of pencil and occasional photography with texts written in both German and English. Each pair of sheets is mounted on black wooden panels, creating a sequence in which words and images repeatedly fold into one another.
But the series is about more than romantic attachment.
Created shortly after Iannone settled permanently in West Berlin in 1976, the work explores love in all its complicated dimensions — physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual. Across the 70-part cycle, desire becomes a vehicle for something larger: the possibility of speaking about sexuality from a woman's perspective without apology or restraint.
That was hardly a neutral position in the 1970s, and it remained central to Iannone's art throughout her life. She repeatedly confronted sexual prudishness, hypocrisy and the social restrictions placed around the body, developing a visual language in which eroticism and self-determination were almost impossible to separate.
Even the identity of the lover at the center of The Berlin Beauties remains tantalizingly ambiguous. Within the narrative, Iannone fashions him after Georges Jacques Danton, the revolutionary figure executed during the French Revolution in 1794. Yet biographical clues point toward a much more immediate inspiration: Dieter Roth, the German-Swiss artist associated with Fluxus who was Iannone's partner and an important presence in her life.
The work, however, was dedicated not to Roth but to Mary Harding, one of Iannone's close friends and a collaborator on the project.
Its subtitle turns the entire cycle outward toward the city itself: “You have no idea how beautiful you are, Berlin.”
Berlin was more than the setting for these works. For Iannone, who was born in Boston in 1933 and had moved from the United States to Europe, the divided city became a place in which questions of personal and political freedom could overlap.
The exhibition also draws attention to how explicitly Iannone questioned the American language of liberty. A screen-printed poster she created for a 1977 exhibition in West Berlin referenced New York's Statue of Liberty. By invoking Liberty Enlightening the World, Iannone turned one of America's most familiar democratic symbols into a more uncomfortable question: Who, exactly, gets to enjoy the freedom being promised?
That question gives the exhibition an unexpected contemporary resonance.
Rather than presenting Iannone as a historical figure in isolation, curator Nra Lukcs has paired her work with that of Alejandra Pombo Su, born in 1979 and currently participating in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program — the same program with which Iannone had a connection five decades earlier.
The relationship between the two artists is not based on visual similarity. Their work belongs to different generations and takes different forms. What connects them instead is an interest in bodies, vulnerability, intimacy and the often fragile ways living beings connect with one another.
Pombo Su works fluidly across performance, poetry, video, sculpture and drawing. In Berlin she has been looking at Iannone's legacy while bringing a concern of her own into the conversation: the relationship between humans and animals.
Her new work, ** A Year of Devotion **, imagines bodies less as isolated entities than as parts of larger systems.
Human and animal forms blend with environments and materials. Watercolor drawings incorporate unexpected physical elements including butterfly wings, flower petals, rhinestones and nail polish. Instead of producing a fixed narrative, Pombo Su creates an open network of drawings, words and substances that viewers can mentally connect and rearrange.
Where Iannone's work begins with the individual voice declaring love and desire, Pombo Su's seems to ask how far the boundaries of the individual body might extend.
Performance pushes that question further.
For the exhibition, Pombo Su developed the site-specific vocal work ** Under Honey **, which was performed at the Gemldegalerie's Cranach Hall on July 4 with the Berlin women's ensemble Feature Chor Berlin.
The performance treated the human voice not simply as language but as vibration — something capable of leaving the body that produces it and occupying the surrounding space. Voices interacted with the architecture, artworks and audience, temporarily transforming the museum itself into part of the work.
Putting Pombo Su beside Iannone also prevents The Berlin Beauties from becoming a closed historical document. Instead, Iannone's questions about bodily autonomy, intimacy and freedom are allowed to move forward through another artist's practice.
The timing is significant. The exhibition is part of “We the People,” an initiative organized by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation around the 250th anniversary of American independence. Across exhibitions, talks, conferences and other programs, the project examines connections between the foundation's collections and American history while encouraging a broader, more complicated understanding of the country's past.
For Iannone, who spent much of her career challenging assumptions she associated with her American upbringing, the context feels particularly fitting.
Yet the most compelling part of The Berlin Beauties may still be its intimacy.
Iannone's drawings were made in a particular city during a particular moment, but they resist remaining there. They speak about the desire to love without embarrassment, to inhabit one's body without surrendering ownership of it, and to find strength in precisely the places where a person is most exposed.
Nearly 50 years after Iannone drew them, those ideas have not become historical curiosities.
Placed beside Pombo Su's delicate networks of human, animal and material life, they instead suggest that vulnerability can be less a weakness than a form of connection — between people, between generations, and between an artist and a city she once addressed as if it were itself a lover.
“Dorothy Iannone: The Berlin Beauties. In Dialogue with Alejandra Pombo Su” is on view through September 13, 2026, at the Gemldegalerie, Kulturforum Berlin. The exhibition is curated by Nra Lukcs, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Kupferstichkabinett.
