Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes at Palais de Tokyo

After laying siege to the German pavilion with her masterpiece Faust, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Anne Imhof takes hold of the entirety of the Palais de Tokyo to create an all-embracing, polyphonic work. Here, she fuses space and bodies, music and painting, and her own works with those of accomplices, especially the artist and musical composer Eliza Douglas, and thirty invited guest artists. 

With this new edition of the Carte Blanche series, the Palais de Tokyo aims to present the full scope and complexity of Imhof’s artistic practice. This major exhibition, the artist’s largest project to date, will bring together painting, drawing and sculpture – aspects of her practice that are relatively unknown in France – as well as a new performance work based on her research into the staging of bodies and sound composition. 

Kvadrat has supported this exhibit with 60 metres of Harald 3 textile from the Kvadrat/Raf Simons collection, used as a barrier in the exhibition to create a special and architectural intervention. 

Within the Palais de Tokyo, Imhof has created a vast landscape of screens in recycled glass. The vocabulary and the forms that she deploys in Natures Mortes suggest both an urban and domestic environment, a glass maze that hems visitors in even as its transparency allows them to see through its walls. Punctuated by references to Imhof’s past oeuvre, including key pieces such as Rage, Angst, Faust and Sex that have never before been presented in Paris, Natures Mortes brings together a singular ensemble of existing and new work. 

Anne Imhof’s exhibition is an unstable form in motion, irrigated by bodies. The artist invites us to walk the space between life and nonlife, darkness and light, past and present, stillness and action, intensity and disenchantment, and to freely trace our own path across this vast, open scene. Haunted by painting, the fleeting cycle of life and the disruptions of the present moment, she composes therein her Natures Mortes [still lifes]—memento mori to the here and now. 

Exhibition dates:  
22 May 2021 – 24 October 2021 

Opening hours: 
The Palais de Tokyo reopens its doors on May 22, from 10am to 8pm, with Anne Imhof's carte blanche, "Natures Mortes". 

Address: 
13, avenue du Président Wilson 75116 Paris