Anne Imhof
Anne Imhof is a German visual artist, choreographer, and performance artist who lives and works between Frankfurt, Paris and Los Angeles. She is best known for her endurance art, although she cites painting and drawing as central to her practice.
In 2015, she was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie. In 2017, she received the Golden Lion for her work Faust at the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and was ranked No.1 on Monopol's Top 100 list.
She was a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 2015.
Early life and education
Imhof was born in Giessen and grew up in Fulda. She was born to teacher father, Michael Imhof, and dentist mother, Annette Imhof-Kramer. Her cousin is art book publisher Michael Imhof.Imhof attended the Catholic Marienschule in Fulda and the Marianum in Fulda, a private Catholic secondary school in the Marianist tradition, graduating in 1997. She studied a year abroad at Prior Park College in Bath, England. There, aged 14, she received private drawing lessons from a teacher, who introduced her to Michelangelo's drawing techniques. She was suspended from the school and sent home to Germany. She describes the environment as having been homophobic, saying she was accused of having the 'evil eye' and bewitching other girls.
Imhof played piano as a child, and later played in several bands.
Imhof described her first work as a performance she staged before studying consisting of a boxing match held in a space in a club that lasted for exactly the duration of a band that was playing. She describes having been influenced by Andy Warhol, Giotto and Caravaggio at the time.
From 2000 to 2003, Imhof studied Visual Communication at the Offenbach University of Art and Design, under Heiner Blum. There she met Nadine Fraczkowski, who she was also in the band 'Daughters from a Good Family' with, and has since worked with as a photographer. In 2003, Imhof presented her first video work, Private Butterflies, made in collaboration with Fraczkowski, at the Festival of Young Talents.
Imhof dropped out of art school as she "couldn't deal with the framework". In her twenties, she moved to Frankfurt, where she lived in a commune and made music. She worked as a bouncer for a club called Robert Johnson.
From 2008–12, Imhof studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. She studied under Judith Hopf. She described her classes with Hopf, as well as Willem de Rooij and Isabelle Graw, as having been "mind-opening".
She won the graduate prize, awarded each year at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, for her final project.
From 2013–14, Imhof lived in Paris on a studio scholarship from the Hessian Cultural Foundation at the Cité internationale des arts, the biggest artist residency in the world.
Work
Imhof works across painting, video, music and performance. She says that all these media are created simultaneously and all influence each another. Her work usually starts in her drawing practice, describing it as creating studies for her work.Collaboration is a big part of her work. She has collaborated with artist Eliza Douglas since 2016, after having met in 2015 in the lobby of Texte zur Kunst's 25th anniversary gala. She has worked many times with people who used to dance for the Forsythe Company, including Josh Johnson and Frances Chiaverini.
Imhof often composes music for her performances, either alone or in collaboration with other artists, which has included Billy Bultheel, Eliza Douglas and Franziska Aigner.
Imhof describes being influenced by the early work of Genesis P-Orridge, Matthew Barney's early work, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Tino Sehgal.
Animals also often feature in Imhof's performances. The first was in Aqua Leo, 1st of at least two. The work included a cast of nine female performers alongside two mules. The work explored the rituals in a nightclub "designed to covertly indicate who is "in," for instance, and who is "out."" Imhof describes it as being "choreographed like a parade that only has internal movement and never actually gets going."
Aqua Leo, 1st of at least two was presented at Imhof's first solo exhibition at Portikus in Frankfurt, where she also presented performances School of the Seven Bells and Ähjeii. SOTSB was named after the urban legend of a school for thieves and vagabonds, taking Robert Bresson's film Pickpocket as a starting point. In 2013, Imhof received a studio grant from the Hessian Cultural Foundation, where she continued to work on SOTSB. ''Ähjeii was a concert that Imhof conceived of as a prequel to the other two works.
Imhof was awarded the Preis there Nationalgalerie for her work Forever Rage. This combined her elements of her works Deal and Rage . This was exhibited at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin from September 2015 to January 2016, alongside the work of other prize winners. The work featured performers moving slowly in a dimly lit room, where black punching bags hung from the ceiling and buttermilk sloshed in concrete basins.
Some of Imhof's early works were shown at her 2024 exhibition Wish You Were Gay''. This included work where Imhof was the performer. The posters for this exhibition were vandalised by being slashed with a knife whilst the exhibition ran.
''Angst I,'' ''Angst II, Angst III'', 2016
Imhof describes this work as an opera in three acts. The music was written by Bill Bultheel.Her work Angst I was premiered at Kunsthalle Basel in 2016. It featured performers interacting in choreographed movements within an installation of objects, paintings, branded consumer products and live falcons. Imhof included falcons as she was interested in the relationship between falcon and falconer, and also said that the falcon is "the best animal in seeing. Their eyes are the best." The work was curated by Elena Filipovic.
Angst II was shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in September 2016, commissioned as part of Imhof's Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2015. The space was fitted with a high wire on which a tightrope walker walked, and filled with fog. Music was played through the performer's individual mobile phones. The work was curated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers and Udo Kittelmann.
Angst III was shown as part of the 2016 Montreal Biennale on 19 October 2016, with the accompanying installation on display at the "Le Grand Balcon" at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal until January 2017. The work was curated by Philippe Pirotte. It was a four-hour durational performance, that took place across two nights. In the piece, performers engaged in a range of actions including shaving each other's backs and stomachs, running into walls, falling off the stage, embracing and staring at the audience. The contained sleeping bags, packs of cigarettes, tubs of Vaseline and crates of Diet Pepsi. Evan Moffitt of Frieze described the performance as being "as dreary and aimless as the prospects for many of today's teenagers, facing a future of debt, fascism and climate change."
The music for the Angst series consisted of classical pieces – an aria, an overture, a march, a ballet, a waltz and a ballad. The music was played through the phones of the performers.
An overture to the Angst cycle was presented at Galerie Buchholz in Cologne in the Spring of 2016.
''Faust'', Venice Biennale, 2017
In 2017, commissioned by Susanne Pfeffer, Imhof represented Germany at the Venice Biennale, transforming the pavilion with her performance piece, 'Faust'. Pfeffer said that she chose Imhof because her work "reflects on the changes that happen to our bodies in political and technological terms and represents a strong realism in a time of great transformation."A glass floor was installed in the pavilion, with objects underneath including a leather mattress, cuffs, spoons, chains, bottles of liquids. Imhof stated that "When you take a glass and horizontal, suddenly you know not equal; there's an above and a below." In one room there was an industrial sink and hose alongside an electric guitar plugged into an amp and pedals. There were also large canvases screen-printed with repeated images of Eliza Douglas. The performers, wearing sportswear and dirty jeans, arranged themselves across the pavilion, both above and below the glass floor and on plinths. They engaged in a range of activities, including checking their mobile phones, masturbation, lighting small fires, staring at audience members, singing. Dobermann dogs walked inside a perimeter fence. The performers used iPhones to communicate to each other during the five-hour durational performances.
Imhof described the performance as an opera. It was accompanied by dissonant sounds emitted from a sound system and the performers' smartphones. Musician Billy Bultheel worked on the sonic framework for the work.
Imhof was rewarded the prestigious Golden Lion award for "Best National Participation". This award is given to only one of the 85 exhibitions mounted in pavilions in the Giardini della Biennale and across Venice The jury called Faust "a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions about our time. It pushes the spectator to a state of anxiety." The work is widely considered to be Imhof's Meisterwerk. People queued for two hours to enter the pavilion. Frieze named the work No.12 of "The 25 Best Works of the 21st Century".
Whilst Imhof's work has been said to have a resemblance to the aesthetics of Nazi Germany, she has said that "That's bullshit. My background is very much an anti-fascist one." However, R. H. Lossin, of e-flux, argues that "To professionally benefit from historical and ongoing political struggles without acknowledging them is a form of symbolic suppression and violence that is surprising even in the context of the supremely cynical universe of art-stardom." Rachel Wetzler, of Artforum, described Imhof as turning "the neoclassical German pavilion, a relic of the Nazi regime, into a kind of luxury display case for human bodies".
David Velasco of ArtForum described the work as "Faust is a work of supremely entitled cool. And yet there's heart here, too. It's a sprawling love letter—a delirious, epic tribute from Imhof to Douglas, and, I like to think, an haute fuck-you to the tyranny of great men."