Artist: Anne Imhof

Cold Hope, Anne Imhof’s fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Buchholz, presents a group of new large format paintings. The works are based on film stills the artist photographed on a screen, inciting blurs, veils, and wave-like pixel structures in a moiré effect. The resulting images are digitally reworked and then translated into paintings in oil on canvas. Through multiple instances of translation, these images circulate across diverse surfaces and techniques of representation. In these transfers and translations, the paintings shift toward abstraction, altering the conditions of their viewing and the structures of attention in which they exist.

The paintings in Cold Hope were developed concurrently with Anne Imhof’s new performance Doom - House of Hope and can be seen as its painterly counterpart. Doom - House of Hope, an epic performance that premiered at New York’s Park Avenue Armory earlier this year, represents Imhof’s largest production of its kind to date. Over the course of three hours, the performance pursues motifs from coming-of-age dramas in various parallel storylines, with the narrative of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet delivered in fragments and in reverse, together with original music, contemporary dance, critical texts on performance, and culminating in virtuosic classical ballet.

Adolescence represents a recurring topos in Anne Imhof’s work, connecting themes of vulnerability and alienation, fears about the future in the face of social constraints, capitalist individualization, and planetary hopelessness. In the conjunction of the personal and the social, in the emotional and the political, and in a fluid intermediate state of growing up, Imhof recognizes the spectral potential for hope and connection, a tension that the artist strives for formally, materially, and experientially in her work. Coming-of-age - with its uncertainty of what is to come and the vulnerable view of oneself within and apart from the world - is described by Imhof as a methodological approach.

The underlying motifs in the new paintings of Cold Hope originate from coming-of-age films that Anne Imhof watched during her research for Doom - House of Hope. The increasing formal abstraction created by means of visual feedback foregrounds the characters’ gestures, crystalizing a kind of universalized depiction of postures within these paintings. The ghostly figures in the painting Romeo (2025), for instance, take on the position of a Pietà, and so, in all their medial distortion, inscribe themselves into a classical pictorial tradition that seems to correspond to the surprising turn to classical ballet at the end of the performance of Doom - House of Hope.

Anne Imhof (b. 1978, Gießen, Germany) lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. In March of this year, Imhof debuted Doom - House of Hope, her largest performance-based work to date, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Recent museum exhibitions include Wish You Were Gay at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2024), Youth, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2022-2023), and Natures Mortes, a momentous show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, which combined building-wide performances staged throughout a curated exhibition with works by Cady Noland, Cy Twombly, Sigmar Polke, Wolfgang Tillmans, Mike Kelley, Jutta Koether, Rosemarie Trockel, Gordon Matta-Clark, and others. In 2019, her exhibition SEX opened at Tate Modern, London and travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago (2019) and to Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2021). In 2017, she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for FAUST, her landmark exhibition at the German Pavilion. Earlier solo exhibitions have been staged at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2016), Kunsthalle Basel (2016), and Portikus, Frankfurt (2013). She was awarded the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2015), the Absolut Art Award (2017), and the Binding Kulturpreis (2022). Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; the Sammlung der Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Tate, London; the Stedelijk Museum and the Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam; and the Pinault Collection, Paris among others.