Carte blanche à Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes
After laying siege to the German pavilion with her exhibition and performance Faust, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Anne Imhof takes hold of the entirety of the Palais de Tokyo to create an all-embracing, polyphonic work. Here, she fuses space and bodies, music and painting, and her own works with those of accomplices, notably with the artist Sturtevant, artist and musical composer Eliza Douglas, and thirty invited guest artists.
▶ Discover Natures Mortes online
After training in Frankfurt am Main at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste-Städelschule, one of Germany’s most prestigious art schools, while immersed in the city’s club and music scene, the artist has established herself over a decade as a prominent figure in contemporary art through her radical work. Within the bared structure of the Palais de Tokyo, stripped down to its fragile carcass with its topography exposed, she fits a glass-walled maze that simultaneously fragments the space and generates new perspectives.
Haunted by painting, the fleeting cycle of life and the disruptions of the present moment, she composes therein her Natures Mortes [still lifes]-memento mori to the here and now. We are encouraged to walk the space between life and nonlife, darkness and light, past and present, stillness and action, intensity and disenchantment, and to freely trace our own path across this vast, open scene.
Artists : Anne Imhof, Alvin Baltrop, Mohamed Bourouissa, Eugène Delacroix, Trisha Donnelly, Eliza Douglas, Cyprien Gaillard, Théodore Géricault, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Jutta Koether, Klara Lidén, Joan Mitchell, Oscar Murillo, Eadweard Muybridge, Cady Noland, Precious Okoyomon, Francis Picabia, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Sigmar Polke, Paul B. Preciado, Bunny Rogers, Sturtevant, Yung Tatu, Paul Thek, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel, Cy Twombly, Adrián Villar Rojas.
Curators: Emma Lavigne and Vittoria Matarrese
Music: Eliza Douglas
Sound installation: Eliza Douglas, Anne Imhof
Anne Imhof
Anne Imhof was born in 1978 in Giessen, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt (Germany).
After studying at the Städelschule (Frankfurt, Germany), in 2013 she put on her first solo exhibition “Parade” in Portikus (Frankfurt, Germany). Since then, Anne Imhof’s work has been shown in particular at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), the Tate Modern (London, 2019), the Hamburger Banhof (Berlin, 2016), Kunsthalle Basel (2016), the MoMA PS1 (New York, 2015) and the Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes (2014). She has also taken part in a large number of group exhibitions and festivals, including the MMK Frankfurt (2019 and 2014), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong, 2019), La Biennale de Montréal (2016), the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2015) and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2015).
Anne Imhof represented Germany at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 where she won the Golden Lion for the best national participation, thanks to her performance Faust. She has also been awarded the Absolut Art Award (2017) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2015).
