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‘I don’t know what you want to know,” 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’s most important contemporary artists, that described her 2025 New York show as “a bad Balenciaga ad”.
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 “catwalk show from hell” 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 – Adidas tracksuit bottoms, chunky trainers, black leather – beseiged the clubs of Berlin and beyond.
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. “Do you want to say I’m dated as an artist?” she asks when I say that the music she has just released for her debut album reminds me of 1990s grunge. “Actually, this is getting quite exhausting,” she says and soon after ends our call (though she later agrees to continue the interview via email).
What most likely caused the annoyance wasn’t the criticism as such, more the fact that it wasn’t 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 – in her telling – that she had an “evil eye” 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 raisonné 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.
Later, in her 30s, Imhof was commissioned to fill the German pavilion at Venice, a building re-designed by the Nazis in 1938. “I decided to make things visible that are obviously problematic in my country,” she explained at the start of our interview. “I built a fence around the house that the Nazis built, and I let dogs piss on the staircase leading up to it.”
Called Faust, the work did not just showcase Imhof’s 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.
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. “Their buildings are mostly made of glass,” says Imhhof. “That transparency is supposed to unite the inside and the outside. But glass creates separation as much as it does visibility.”
Faust was also one of the first major art shows that seemed to be specially designed for Instagram. “It was the height of social media becoming a new way of communicating,” says Imhof. “In 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.”
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’s three-hour New York show swapped out some cultural signifiers – 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: “We’re fucked, we’re doomed, we’re dead / I think I made you up inside my head.” That was one of the choruses chanted by Imhof’s roving cast. Hyperallergic’s critic called it “excessively pessimistic about the future” and “comically apolitical”.
Her dalliances with the world of fashion, too, have invited a backlash, which might explain her bristling at the “Balenciaga ad” dig. After years of serving as a semi-official muse for Balenciaga’s former creative director Demna, she designed a moody show for Burberry during lockdown in 2020. Last year, she put on a “battle of the bands” performance sponsored by Nike, including a special-edition football top with “Imhof” written on the back.
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’s 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: “One front-row appearance is one too many.”
How has Imhof bounced back from this? Does she now feel pressure to be more politically explicit? “I think I have a responsibility towards my work,” she says, “but also towards the people I work with, not to make political statements just to make pieces more desirable. It’s not that I think art isn’t political – on the contrary. It’s 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’t happen inside a museum space.”
The title of Imhof’s 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.
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. “The viewer confronts a sculpture that already embodies control rather than being guided through it,” she says. “The body becomes a site of thought, movement a form of intelligence – that is inherently political.”
In another corner, a four-channel film overlays footage of the New York show with a passage from Australian science-fiction writer Greg Egan’s 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.
“A lot of things have changed since I made Faust in 2017, when maybe we were at the height of social media,” she says. “Perhaps now it is not about the presence of bodies, or about being seen. It’s more about sheltering a certain artistic autonomy and having to mimic something to be not taken in by it.”
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 “Wish You Were Gay”) 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. “I think there is a need or a desire of mine to make my work accessible,” she says. “I don’t think the future of art lies in making it into some elite bubble.”
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 “mimicking something in order not to be taken in by it”? Or are they just making lifestyle consumer products, pure and simple?
“When I talk about mimicry, I mean a strategy for staying alert within powerful systems, including social structures, as a means of survival,” she says. “Fashion and art are not separate moral systems. They both involve labour, production, and circulation that aren’t 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.”
Adorno might be the patron saint of her Porto show, but would he have approved of her work for Nike? “My interest is not in claiming moral purity, but in remaining aware of the conditions of production – who is involved, how labour is treated, and what choices I make as an artist. Collaborating with fashion or popular culture doesn’t surrender autonomy.”
