An Icelandic Saga
1978, 1983, 198648 drawings, ink on Bristol board
each 40 x 30 cm.
In 1966, Iannone starts experimenting with artists’ books, both to expand the sphere of her narratives through the temporal effect of a page-turning (...) She develops various formats for her books, including story-sequences resembling comics (without speech bubbles) that absorbs and enhance the autobiographical impetus of her oeuvre. Books enable her to combine and juxtapose individual images, as well as to give a story its specific drive. For An Icelandic Saga, Iannone describes in 48 unpublished plates her trip to Reykjavík in 1967 as the “journey which seems to have made all other journeys possible.” It was there she met the artist Dieter Roth, with whom she swiftly fell in love and for whom she left her husband and a comfortable life in the United States. But it also marks the start of another kind of journey: Iannone’s maturation as an artist and her lifelong quest to achieve ecstatic unity, or “becoming one with another” by way of erotic love.
