Dorothy Iannone. A Cookbook

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.