Polymath artist Anne Imhof takes over the Stedelijk’s impressive space by staging another oeuvre d’art totale mixing all disciplines from art, architecture, light, sound and philosophy. Imhof’s first solo show in the Netherlands is a collaboration between the Stedelijk and the Hartwig Art Foundation. Youth is on view until 29 January 2023.

Anne Imhof has emerged over the past decade as one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation. Today based between Berlin and New York, Imhof spent her formative years in Frankfurt am Main, where she taught herself to draw and make music while working as a bouncer at a local night club. Before eventually enrolling at the city’s academy of fine arts, Städelschule, she staged what she later designated the first entry to her catalogue raisonné: a one-night only performance in a red light district bar. She invited two boxers to take part and recruited a band. The boxers were told that the fight should last for as long as the music was playing, while the band were instructed to play for as long as the boxers were fighting. Imhof explained: “It was all pretty red—the table dance bar and the noses. Looking back on it I realized that it had been one way to create a picture.”

The works in Avatar II at London’s Sprüth Magers until 23 December, interweave notions of reality and artifice, presence and absence, exposure and concealment. The works range from scratched paintings on aluminum panels, drawings to film and sound works. Fitness equipment and gym furniture are installed throughout the gallery, blurring the boundaries between objects and installations.

The physical, “real” presence of the lockers and benches is rendered surreal and abstract in a new film debuting within the exhibition. Downstairs, muse Eliza Douglas appears again, this time occupying an amorphous space as she sits and stands surrounded by one of the locker-room benches and a row of lockers. The film’s backdrop shifts between abstracted fields of colour and light. Though bodies are mostly absent in Imhof’s artworks—which often imply potential sites for performances—in this case the human body is fully present and the background is what becomes nebulous and intangible. This aspect of the film also serves as a metaphor for Imhof’s approach more broadly: to deploy specific, precise objects and imagery that nevertheless project a universal, expansive realm for imagination.

–