ANNE IMHOF
RARELY HAS AN ARTIST SO TOTALLY EMBODIED HER TIMES AS ANNE IMHOF: SINCE HER FIRST PERFORMANCES UP TILL HER CONSECRATION AT THE 2017 VENICE ART BIENNALE, SHE HAS USED THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY AS HER PRIMARY MATERIAL. INVITED BY PARIS’S PALAIS DE TOKYO TO FILL ITS SPACES WITH A SOLO SHOW, SHE HAS REALIZED A MASTERPIECE, ONE OF THE FIRST OF THE 2020S.
When, in January 2020, Anne Imhof came to check out the spaces at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo for her giant solo exhibition Natures Mortes, she arrived with a halo of institutional recognition. But, rare for an artist, she was also one of the architects of the visual and sonic fabric of her times – the late 2010s – whose affective texture she helped shape, through the 2.0 documentation of her performances that circulates on Instagram, as well as the soundtracks to them,
which brim with an abrasive and primal energy, and are now available as an album released by the label PAN. Imhof was everywhere, but in the manner of an elusive rumour, of an underground wave carried by a few tiny pixels. We caught surface hints of it, such as the abrasive sportswear that some have named health goth, the simple everyday dress of the generation of creatives who divide their time between clubs and and their laptops. You could feel the ambiguous energy, that severe bass overlaid with elegiac flights, translating the urge to snatch a glimpse of freedom from the globalized post-capitalism that constrains desiring bodies as much as it does our fragmented attention. But in truth, Imhof was still dealing in absence and disappointment: one sensed the vibrating tension, the ecstatic climax, but it all slipped through the fingers like sand.
During her January trip to Paris, she agreed, despite her reluctance to appear in public, to take part in a student workshop at the École des Beaux-arts about her own experience as an art student. She had always wanted to make art, she insisted, even though she had never really felt legitimate. Born in 1978 in Giessen, to a Catholic family, she grew up in Frankfurt, 70 km away. She first studied visual communication, in the early 2000s, at the school of applied arts in Offenbach, at which point she began to meet some of the people who would come to count, like Nadine Fraczkowski, who still photographs her performances, exhibitions and portraits. She chose a nightclub as her base, Frankfurt’s Robert Johnson, the epicentre of Germany’s techno scene at the time. She started out as a bouncer at the door, before working as a DJ behind the decks. Intimidated, she surrounded herself with her friends and got them to hang out by the DJ booth. This, in a certain way, was how her performances began, spontaneously, without thinking about the context. At 28, she applied to Frankfurt’s Städelschule, one of the most prestigious art schools in the world, but for her just the local art college. She joined Willem