the hands that do things so sweetly

We are delighted to announce the hands that do things so sweetly , an exhibition by Dorothy Iannone and Sarah Pucci.

Female sexuality and the search for personal freedom, unconventional love and the pursuit for ecstatic unity, the celebration of matriarchy and Eros, are some of the themes central to Dorothy Iannone's art. In the early 1960s, Iannone moved to Europe, leading an itinerant, bohemian life that also included spending periods in Asia. Her hybrid form of image and text draws from autobiography, anecdote, allegory, song, dreamscape and fiction, creating an erotic iconography largely inspired by non-Western and Buddhist imagery, and subject of censorship on several occasions. Iannone passionately described her lived experience, intimate friendships and relationships with her muses, artists and lovers, establishing a dialogue with the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

In 1972, Iannone first presented sculptures by her mother, Sarah Pucci (Everett, Massachusetts, 1902-1996), at her friend Daniel Spoerri's Eat Art Galerie (Düsseldorf). Pucci made artworks exclusively as gifts to her daughter while Iannone was traveling and living in Europe, forming a story of love and transatlantic correspondence between mother and daughter. Intimate and baroque, Pucci’s bejeweled objects act as love forms expressing both religious and familial adoration, placing devotion at the centre of her work. The horror vacui and ecstatic ornamentation shared with her daughter's paintings and sculptures, are nevertheless absent in the early works by Iannone on view in the exhibition.

Iannone’s collages, made in 1962 during an extended visit to Kyoto, share an interest in assembling found objects into momentos of deeply personal lived experience. Influenced by traditional Japanese paper art, oriental elements such as ikebana and Zen gardens, as well as the syle of the New York School painters, Beat generation collagists and Fluxus poets, Iannone developed the series of collages entitled Flower Arrangement with gold leaf and Japanese paper, to which she would later attribute a profound influence in her turn towards figuration. “Lovers gradually appeared and became more and more distinct and … from the very beginning their genitals were not only present but extremely prominent too. This was surely an unconscious unfolding of what was in my heart".

Dorothy Iannone's voice resonates in the space of the gallery, a deeply felt invocation to her mother. In the film Sarah Pucci: A Piece About My Mother and Her Work, 1980, Iannone reads a text written by Pucci in which she tells the story of her life, intermingling significant memories with apparently trivial moments. In the image, a close-up shot shows family photographs and several of Pucci's sculptures against a black background, changing places, entering and leaving the scene, by a hand that appears in the space as if in a puppet theatre. Iannone then plays a tape of her lover and muse, the German artist and poet Dieter Roth, reciting a scatological homage to Pucci. Iannone continues the piece by narrating a mystical, orgasmic dream she had while sleeping in Pucci's bed, Iannone concludes her homage by addressing her mother directly, the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship interlaced with love, devotion, obligation and duty, "Sarah and Dorothy. I would not have it any other way".

Dorothy Iannone (Boston, Massachusetts 1933 - Berlin, 2022). She studied literature at Boston University before turning her attention to art in the late 1950s. In the early 1960s she moved to Europe and became associated with avant-garde art movements that sought to break artistic boundaries and challenge conventional cultural norms. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Museum of Contemporary Art (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2023); Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, Germany (2023); Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019); Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2019); Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2014); Camden Arts Center, London, UK (2013); New Museum, New York, NY (2009); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); and Kunst-Werke in Berlin, Berlin, Germany (1992). Her group exhibitions include Seductive Subversion: Contemporary Women Artists 1958-1968 at the Brooklyn Museum (2010), Bodypoliticx at the Witte de With in Rotterdam (2007) and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Her work is in the permanent collections of museums around the world, including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (California), the Tate Modern in London (UK) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (France), among many others. This is her first exhibition in Spain.

Sarah Pucci (Everett, Massachusetts, 1902-1996). She worked in sweet factories making designs on chocolates, and in the Leopold Morse clothing factory, in the naval shipyards and at General Electric. She survived two husbands and had only one daughter, Dorothy Iannone. In 1959, at the age of fifty-seven, Pucci began creating objects by covering Styrofoam shapes with sequins, beads, plastic rhinestones and fake pearls. Over more than three decades, she produced some 200 of them, always addressed to her daughter. Her work has been the subject of several exhibitions at Air de Paris, Paris, France, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions such as Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013); Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, Germany (2007); Kunstahalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006). This is the first time her work has been shown in Spain.

With many thanks to Air de Paris, Paris, France.