{"id":395413,"date":"2026-01-28T18:08:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T18:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/395413\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T18:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T18:08:07","slug":"do-you-want-to-say-im-dated-artist-anne-imhof-on-her-sm-venice-shocker-and-the-show-that-earned-a-mauling-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/395413\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Do you want to say I\u2019m dated?\u2019 Artist Anne Imhof on her S&M Venice shocker \u2013 and the show that earned a mauling | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018I don\u2019t know what you want to know,\u201d says Anne Imhof, three-quarters of the way into our interview. Her cautious smile, between curtains of jet black hair, changes into a sceptical pout. I have just quoted a headline at Imhof, one of Germany\u2019s most important contemporary artists, that described her 2025 New York show as \u201ca bad Balenciaga ad\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Just a few years ago, Imhof was the hottest ticket on the international art circuit: a Golden Lion winner at the 2017 Venice Biennale, whose transformation of the German pavilion into a sinister, S&M-flavoured \u201ccatwalk show from hell\u201d had masses scrambling to join the queue. Imhof was a cultural polymath whose shows combined etchings, paintings, dance, live music and film; a muse to fashion designers whose sporty goth aesthetic \u2013 Adidas tracksuit bottoms, chunky trainers, black leather \u2013 beseiged the clubs of Berlin and beyond.<\/p>\n

\u2018I built a fence around the house the Nazis built \u2013 and let dogs piss on its steps\u2019<\/p>\n

But her last sprawling mega-show, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, was met with mixed reviews in US broadsheets and proper drubbings in hipster online journals such as Hyperallergic and Spike. Suddenly the next generation seemed all too eager to cancel her membership of the cool club. Still, I had expected she would rise to me bringing it up. Instead, the shutters come down. The arms she enthusiastically waved across the screen minutes earlier are now locked across her chest. My questions become longer, her answers shorter. \u201cDo you want to say I\u2019m dated as an artist?\u201d she asks when I say that the music she has just released for her debut album<\/a> reminds me of 1990s grunge. \u201cActually, this is getting quite exhausting,\u201d she says and soon after ends our call (though she later agrees to continue the interview via email).<\/p>\n

Critical moment \u2026 last year\u2019s Doom: House of Hope, which was called \u2018a bad Balenciaga ad\u2019. Photograph: George Etheredge\/New York Times\/Redux\/eyevine<\/p>\n

What most likely caused the annoyance wasn\u2019t the criticism as such, more the fact that it wasn\u2019t direct enough. Because open conflict is something Imhof, now 48, always seemed to thrive on. Educated at private schools in Germany and Britain, she was suspended from a boarding school in Bath on the grounds \u2013 in her telling<\/a> \u2013 that she had an \u201cevil eye\u201d and was bewitching other girls. While studying art in Offenbach and Frankfurt, she moonlit as a bouncer at the Robert Johnson nightclub. The first entry in her catalogue raisonn\u00e9<\/a> is a performance she put on at a red-light bar, where two boxers had to fight each other until a band in the other corner played their last note.<\/p>\n

Later, in her 30s, Imhof was commissioned to fill the German pavilion at Venice, a building re-designed by the Nazis in 1938. \u201cI decided to make things visible that are obviously problematic in my country,\u201d she explained at the start of our interview. \u201cI built a fence around the house that the Nazis built, and I let dogs piss on the staircase leading up to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Called Faust, the work did not just showcase Imhof\u2019s taste for conflict, but also her gift for conjuring up images that obliquely capture the spirit of our age. Once visitors got past the menacing dobermans patrolling outside, they found themselves walking across a raised glass floor that spanned the building and unsettled its occupants. The feeling was exacerbated by a crew of dead-eyed performers in black sportswear, who roamed among and below the crowd, playing thrash metal or sulkily hovering over their phones.<\/p>\n

In front of my eyes, Faust became something the audience created<\/p>\n

All the cultural preoccupations of the 2010s were there: the militarisation of physical borders on land, the melting away of barriers in the digital sphere, tech surveillance and Apple Store aesthetics. Imhof says she was living in Frankfurt at the time, home to the European Central Bank, which played a key role in the decades of sovereign debt crises. \u201cTheir buildings are mostly made of glass,\u201d says Imhhof. \u201cThat transparency is supposed to unite the inside and the outside. But glass creates separation as much as it does visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faust was also one of the first major art shows that seemed to be specially designed for Instagram. \u201cIt was the height of social media becoming a new way of communicating,\u201d says Imhof. \u201cIn front of my eyes, Faust turned from something I created into something the audience created. They were coming up with their own edits, their own iconography.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trouble with art that captures the zeitgeist, of course, is that the zeitgeist moves on, relentlessly. Entitled Doom: House of Hope and performed underneath a giant ticking doomsday clock, Imhof\u2019s three-hour New York show swapped out some cultural signifiers \u2013 out went the Germanic guard dogs, in came high-school jocks, cheerleaders and grunge kids. But it featured many of the same performers as the Venice show and reprised a feeling of existential exhaustion: \u201cWe\u2019re fucked, we\u2019re doomed, we\u2019re dead \/ I think I made you up inside my head.\u201d That was one of the choruses chanted by Imhof\u2019s roving cast. Hyperallergic\u2019s critic called it \u201cexcessively pessimistic about the future\u201d and \u201ccomically apolitical\u201d.<\/p>\n

In at the deep end \u2026 the pool from Fun is a Steel Bath. Photograph: Jo\u00e3o Morgado<\/p>\n

Her dalliances with the world of fashion, too, have invited a backlash, which might explain her bristling at the \u201cBalenciaga ad\u201d dig. After years of serving as a semi-official muse for Balenciaga\u2019s former creative director Demna, she designed a moody show for Burberry during lockdown in 2020. Last year, she put on a \u201cbattle of the bands\u201d performance sponsored by Nike, including a special-edition football top with \u201cImhof\u201d written on the back.<\/p>\n

This winter, she and her new partner, US ballet dancer Devon Teuscher, were photographed in a hotel bed dressed in Valentino, for the Italian fashion brand\u2019s new campaign. German newspaper Welt said her career was starting to resemble a cautionary tale of what happens to artists who get into bed with the fashion industry: \u201cOne front-row appearance is one too many.\u201d<\/p>\n

How has Imhof bounced back from this? Does she now feel pressure to be more politically explicit? \u201cI think I have a responsibility towards my work,\u201d she says, \u201cbut also towards the people I work with, not to make political statements just to make pieces more desirable. It\u2019s not that I think art isn\u2019t political \u2013 on the contrary. It\u2019s about creating a space you share, in which you show moments of love and care, as extremely skilled people give everything. My goal is not to politicise my art, or to justify it in that context, to monetise or profit on that. Revolutions don\u2019t happen inside a museum space.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think the future of art lies in making it into some elite bubble<\/p>\n

The title of Imhof\u2019s latest exhibition, Fun ist ein Stahlbad, or Fun is a Steel Bath, could be read as her answering her critics on the politics point. Showing at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, it cites the philosopher Theodor Adorno, for whom naive hope has no place in modern art: at best, artists can create works that expose how deeply damaged our world has become.<\/p>\n

While previous Imhof shows were emphatically immersive, this one is filled with sculptures designed to be uninviting: in the courtyard, Imhof has built an empty swimming pool out of black metal, the literal steel bath of the title. Elsewhere, there is a grid of crowd-control barriers. \u201cThe viewer confronts a sculpture that already embodies control rather than being guided through it,\u201d she says. \u201cThe body becomes a site of thought, movement a form of intelligence \u2013 that is inherently political.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another corner, a four-channel film overlays footage of the New York show with a passage from Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan\u2019s novel Diaspora, about a dystopian, proto-fascist future in which software births genderless beings without parents. Pessimism, she seems to be saying, can be political too.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of things have changed since I made Faust in 2017, when maybe we were at the height of social media,\u201d she says. \u201cPerhaps now it is not about the presence of bodies, or about being seen. It\u2019s more about sheltering a certain artistic autonomy and having to mimic something to be not taken in by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zebra crossing \u2026 a still from a video work for Wish You Were Gay. Photograph: Anne Imhof<\/p>\n

Does it all add up? Adorno was a firm believer that artistic autonomy could only be sheltered in high-modernist art, and that all entertainment was essentially a form of cultural coercion. But Imhof makes art that wants to be autonomous and popular, pulling in anything from painting to graffiti, from rock to rap, from modern dance to classical ballet. This debut album WYWG (short for \u201cWish You Were Gay\u201d) contains songs she mostly wrote in the early noughties, bearing the influence of hard-to-digest acts like Genesis P-Orridge and Black Flag. Yet some songs, Brand New Gods for instance, also bring to mind the Velvet Underground: austere but surprisingly catchy. \u201cI think there is a need or a desire of mine to make my work accessible,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t think the future of art lies in making it into some elite bubble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artists who design football shirts may be breaking out of the art world bubble, but if they make that shirt for Nike, are they still \u201cmimicking something in order not to be taken in by it\u201d? Or are they just making lifestyle consumer products, pure and simple?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I talk about mimicry, I mean a strategy for staying alert within powerful systems, including social structures, as a means of survival,\u201d she says. \u201cFashion and art are not separate moral systems. They both involve labour, production, and circulation that aren\u2019t fully transparent. For me, the question is more about agency: who makes decisions, who is involved, and whether the work can maintain its critical position while moving through these systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adorno might be the patron saint of her Porto show, but would he have approved of her work for Nike? \u201cMy interest is not in claiming moral purity, but in remaining aware of the conditions of production \u2013 who is involved, how labour is treated, and what choices I make as an artist. Collaborating with fashion or popular culture doesn\u2019t surrender autonomy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fun ist ein Stahlbad is at Funda\u00e7\u00e3o de Serralves, Porto,<\/a> until 19 April; WYWG<\/a> is out on Pan Records<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018I don\u2019t know what you want to know,\u201d says Anne Imhof, three-quarters of the way into our interview.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-395413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}