She was the art world’s hottest ticket after her confrontational goths-and-dobermans show at the Venice Biennale. But did she get too cosy with the worlds of fashion and advertising?
‘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).
