It took a while for Dorothy Iannone to have her first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition in Berlin—considering that she has lived and worked here since 1976, when she was invited by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), and, like many involved in that program, stayed. The American-born Iannone was an autodidact who started painting in 1959 in an Abstract Expressionist style, and who later turned to ornamental allover structures and sexually charged figuration. Her life and career took a turn when she traveled to Iceland with her millionaire husband in 1967 and befriended

In Joan Didion’s famous description of New York’s “insistent sentimentalization of experience,” she claimed it involved a century-old “distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative.” Today, however, her observation calls for different terms. The distortion of character may be ubiquitous, but flattening is too simple a word to describe what links self to surface; and rather than being reduced, events are exaggerated through narrative. New York’s “downtown scene,” for example, thrives on its relationship with its own romanticized past, which is not to deny the

Often misread as a structuralist filmmaker, James Benning is really more of a landscape poet. His work reflects a complete surrender to the mired totality of the natural world, yet he is ever mindful of humankind’s tinkerings and contaminations. In recent years, Benning’s oeuvre has extended beyond cinema—though, thankfully, he had not completely neglected it. His 2011 Two Cabins project was inspired by a perceived affinity between two philosopher-seekers of the American back-to-nature dream, Henry David Thoreau and Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski. On his own property in the Sierra Mountains of