“You want to say I dated?” Artist Anne Imhoff talks about the shock of S&M Venice – and the critically acclaimed show | Art and design

‘I “I don’t know what you want to know,” says Anne Imhoff, three-quarters of the way into our interview. Her cautious smile, between the curtains of dark black hair, turned into a skeptical frown. I just quoted a headline from Imhoff, one of Germany’s most important contemporary artists, who called her 2025 New York show a “bad ad for Balenciaga.”

Just a few years ago, Imhoff 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 an S&M-flavored “fashion show from hell” had crowds scrambling to join the queue. Imhof was a cultural polymath whose performances combined etchings, paintings, dance, live music and film. She was an inspiration to fashion designers whose gothic sports aesthetic — Adidas track pants, chunky sneakers, black leather — besieged the clubs of Berlin and beyond.

But its latest mega show, held at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, was met with mixed reviews in US newspapers and a decent rout in trendy online magazines such as Hyperallergic and Spike. Suddenly the next generation seemed very keen to revoke her membership in the wonderful club. However, I expected that it would interest me. Instead, the shutters come down. The arms she had waved excitedly across the screen minutes ago were now locked across her chest. My questions get longer, and my answers get shorter. “Do you want to say that I am a historian as an artist?” She asks me when I say that the music she just released for her debut album reminds me of 90s grunge. “It actually became very stressful,” she says, and soon after she ended our call (although she later agreed to continue the interview via email).

What probably caused the upset wasn’t the criticism itself, but the fact that it wasn’t direct enough. Because open conflict is something Emhoff, now 48, always seems to thrive on. She was educated in private schools in Germany and Britain, and was expelled from a boarding school in Bath on the grounds that she had an “evil eye” and was bewitching other girls. While studying art in Offenbach and Frankfurt, she worked as a bouncer at Robert Johnson’s nightclub. Her first entry Raisoni catalogue It’s a show I did in a red light bar, where two boxers had to fight until a band in the other corner played their last music.

Later, in her 30s, Imhof was commissioned to fill the German Pavilion in Venice, a building that the Nazis had redesigned in 1938. “I decided to make clearly visible things that were a problem in my country,” she explained at the beginning of our interview. “I built a fence around the house that the Nazis built, and I let the dogs urinate on the stairs leading up to it.”

This work, called “Faust,” demonstrated not only Emhoff’s penchant for conflict, but also her talent for conjuring images that indirectly capture the spirit of our time. Once visitors got past the menacing Doberman Pinschers patrolling outside, they found themselves walking through a raised glass floor covering the building and unsettling its occupants. This feeling was exacerbated by a crew of black-clad performers who wandered between and below the crowd, playing thrash metal or hovering scowling over their phones.

All the cultural preoccupations of the 2000s were there: the militarization of physical boundaries on the ground, the dissolving of barriers in the digital realm, the policing of technology and the aesthetics of the Apple Store. Emhoff says she was living in Frankfurt at the time, the headquarters of the European Central Bank, which has played a major role in decades of sovereign debt crises. “Most of their buildings are made of glass,” Imhoff says. “This transparency is supposed to unify the inside and the outside. But the glass creates separation as much as it creates vision.”

Faust was also one of the first major art shows that seemed specifically designed for Instagram. “It was the pinnacle of social media becoming a new way to communicate,” Imhoff says. “Before my eyes, Faust was transformed from something I had created into something the audience had created. They were creating their own adaptations, their own iconography.”

The problem with art that captures the zeitgeist, of course, is that the zeitgeist moves relentlessly. Titled “Doom: House of Hope” and staged under a giant doomsday clock, Emhoff’s three-hour show in New York swapped some cultural signifiers — out went the Germanic guard dogs, in came the high school jocks, cheerleaders, and grunge kids. But it featured many of the same artists who appeared in the Venice show, and reenacted the feeling of existential exhaustion: “We’re spent, doomed, we’re dead / I think I created you inside my head.” That was one of the choruses chanted by Emhoff’s touring crew. Critics of Hypersensitivity described him as “overly pessimistic about the future” and “farcically apolitical”.

Her adventures in the fashion world also sparked a backlash, which may explain her anger at the Balenciaga ad. After years of serving as a semi-official muse for former Balenciaga creative director Demna, she designed a moody show for Burberry during lockdown in 2020. Last year, she presented a “Battle of the Bands” show sponsored by Nike, including a special-edition football jacket emblazoned with “Imhof” on the back.

This winter, she and her new partner, American ballet dancer Devon Tuscher, were photographed in a hotel bed wearing Valentino, for the Italian fashion brand’s new advertising campaign. German newspaper Welt said her career was beginning to resemble a cautionary tale of what happens to artists entering the fashion industry: “One appearance in the front row is one appearance too many.”

How did Emhoff bounce back from this? Do you now feel pressure to be more politically clear? She says: “I believe I have a responsibility to my work, but also to the people I work with, not to make political statements just to make pieces of art more desirable. I don’t think art is not political – on the contrary. It’s about creating a space that you share, in which moments of love and care emerge, where highly skilled people give everything. My goal is not to politicize my art, or justify it in this context, to monetize or profit from it. Revolutions don’t happen inside a museum space.”

The title of Emhoff’s latest exhibition, Fun ist ein Stahlbad, or Fun is a Steel Bath, can be read as her responding to her critics on a political point. It is on display at the Serralves Foundation in Porto, and cites the philosopher Theodor Adorno, who argues that naive hope has no place in modern art: at best, artists can create works that reveal how deeply damaged our world is.

While Emhoff’s previous shows have been decidedly immersive, this one is full of sculptures designed to be uninviting: In the courtyard, Emhoff has constructed an empty black metal swimming pool, the literal steel bathroom of the title. Elsewhere, there is a network of crowd control barriers. “The viewer is confronted with a sculpture that embodies control rather than being directed by it,” she says. “The body becomes a site of thought, movement becomes a form of intelligence – and this is inherently political.”

In another corner, a four-channel film juxtaposes footage from the New York show with a clip from Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan’s novel Diaspora, about a dystopian, proto-fascist future in which programs generate sexless beings without fathers. She seems to be saying that pessimism can also be political.

“A lot of things have changed since I filmed ‘Faust’ in 2017, when we were probably at the height of social media,” she says. “Maybe now it’s not about the presence of bodies, or seeing them. It’s more about protecting a certain artistic independence and having to imitate something so as not to be fooled by it.”

Does it all add up? Adorno was a firm believer that artistic independence could only be protected in high modernist art, and that all entertainment was essentially a form of cultural coercion. But Emhoff makes art that wants to be independent and popular, appealing to 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 I wrote mostly in the early 2000s, bearing the influence of hard-to-digest acts like Genesis P-Orridge and Black Flag. However, some songs, like Brand New Gods for example, are also reminiscent of the Velvet Underground: austere yet surprisingly catchy. “I think there is a need or desire for me to make my work accessible to everyone,” she says. “I don’t think the future of art lies in turning it into an elite bubble.”

The artists who design football shirts may have emerged from the bubble of the art world, but if they made this shirt for Nike, are they still “imitating something so as not to be fooled by it”? Or do they just make 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 work, production and circulation that are not completely transparent. For me, the question is more about agency: who makes the decisions, who participates, and whether the work can maintain its critical position while moving through these systems.”

Adorno may have been the patron saint of her show in Porto, 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 the work is approached, and what choices I make as an artist. Collaborating with fashion or popular culture does not mean giving up autonomy.”