Anne Imhof / Natures mortes. Palais 31 Magazine du 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 has taken 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 the artist Eliza Douglas and thirty other guests. After training at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt -one of Germany's most prestigious art schools, while immersed in the city's club and music scene, Anne Imhof has established herself over a decade as a prominent figure in contemporary art through her radical work. Within the bare structure of the Palais de Tokyo, stripped down to its fragile carcass with its topography exposed, she sets up a glass maze which multiplies and generates new perspectives. Vanishing points and gaps are an invitation to diving into the darkness, down to the entrails of the Palais de Tokyo, to its underground. Tinged by shades of Baudelairian spleen, and by dark romanticism of artists from Goya to Gericault, from Piranesi to Delacroix-investing the world of spectres and the occult, in a provocative, festive disenchantment that brings to mind Rimbaud and his Night in Hell, Anne Imhof's works awaken myths and fears. The fears of Faust, the alchemist who contracted a pact with the devil, or the fears in an alienated society watched over by drones. Inanimate objects, wilted flowers, burned-down candles or cans of evaporating liquid stimulate all our senses." from the introduction by Emma Lavigne