Anne Imhof, EMO (Installation View), via Art Observed
Marking the largest presentation of the artist’s work to date in the United States, Anne Imhof’s solo exhibition EMO, which opened this month at Sprüth Magers’s Los Angeles exhibition space, brings together several bodies of work across multiple mediums, putting each in dialogue with found objects in ways that implicate visitors’ bodies as they move through the space, at turns exalting and frustrating the viewing experience. Imhof, who has pioneered a visceral and impassioned body of work over the past decade, has long drawn on discourses of youth culture, repressed energies, pop signifiers and a range of cultural and social frameworks to explore the body’s relation to society, and the contingent effects each have on the other, here returns to the labyrinthine structures of previous shows to explore these notions once again.
Anne Imhof, EMO (Installation View), via Art Observed
For EMO, visitors enter and first encounter a a maze of industrial water tanks that snakes through the gallery’s ground floor, creating hallways, enclosures and windows bathed in a deep-red glow. The tanks’ caged armatures stretch several feet high, obscuring both the viewer’s physical path and their sight lines onto Imhof’s paintings, creating moments of chilling encounter with immense clown faces, primary colors and swathes of clouds. The artist regularly plays with the anxiety and anticipation around what can and cannot be seen, what remains hidden and in need of excavation, as well as the charged nature of empty spaces, and here takes that notion to an extreme, a haunted house constructed of industrial materials and charged visuals.
Anne Imhof, EMO (Installation View), via Art Observed
Anne Imhof, EMO (Installation View), via Art Observed
Elsewhere, Imhof contrasts the ground floor’s confinement and claustrophobia with a powerful counterpoint. In Youth (2022), a group of horses runs and communes together in an open field covered in freshly fallen snow. They seem to nurture one another, moving beautifully and freely through this natural environment to the baroque strains of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. As day moves slowly into night, the camera gradually reveals the site to be an urban one, a historic social housing development located at the edge of the city. Yet the utopian feeling created between these animals is unmarred by this revelation.
Imhof, returning to the states with another powerful body of work, once again shows why she has become a dynamic and powerful voice in the contemporary landscape with this show. It closes May 6th.
– D. Creahan
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Anne Imhof: Emo [Sprüth Magers]
