While there has been a resurgence of interest in Iannone over the past several years, her work was, for many years, overshadowed by that of her former partner, Dieter Roth, or shunned for its frank embrace of sexual imagery: though she has been active since the early 1960s, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Dorothy Iannone: Lioness at the New Museum, was only held in 2009. When the Air de Paris partners first met the artist in 2005—her first exhibition at the gallery was held a year later—“Dorothy had no gallery, no particular support in the art world….She had met censorship all her life.” A “series of coincidences” led to the gallery’s working relationship with the artist, Bonnefous says. Merino had, it turned out, grown up with works by the artist in his parents’ home in Monte Carlo; after a friend mentioned that he had met with the artist in Berlin and that she had no gallery representation, the partners decided to pay her a visit. 

Alongside works by Iannone, Air de Paris’s Independent presentation will include works by Jef Geys and Eliza Douglas, extending the themes of the gallery’s recently-opened exhibition Les destin des châteaux croisés hosted by Los Angeles gallery Chateau Shatto. The exhibition, which features work by Iannone, Geys, Guy de Cointet, and Raul Guerrero, is inspired by Italo Calvino’s "Castle of Crossed Destinies," in which a group of knights exchange stories of their myriad adventures via a game of tarot. 

According to Bonnefous, the decision to “bring together certain artists is very intuitive.” After determining that they would feature Iannone—one of the oldest artists represented by Air de Paris—“I wondered, who is the youngest? Let’s travel [with] them together,” leading to the inclusion of Eliza Douglas, a recent addition to the gallery’s program. From there, Bonnefous and Merino added works from Jef Geys’s long-term series “¡Women’s Questions!,” lists of questions about women’s social roles first developed in 1965 while the artist was teaching at a girls’ school in Belgium as a pedagogical exercise. Over the years, Geys has translated the questions into multiple languages, presenting them as a series of scrolls on patterned oilcloth with handwritten text. For Bonnefous, what links the three artists, isn’t so much a shared sensibility as their individuality: “they are three very special individuals…not caring much [about] the opinions of the outside world. They share a certain degree of freedom.” The associative logic behind the gallery’s process in organizing the presentation is, she says, a form of “non-sense. But non-sense is productive, too, and allows poetry to get in.”