The new Anne Imhof exhibition, Citizen, now on view at Sprüth Magers London, brings together painting, sculpture, film, and drawing in a haunting examination of memory, mortality, and corporeal presence. Building on ideas explored in DOOM: House of Hope and Fun ist ein Stahlbad, the project considers how experience lingers within the body long after the moment has passed.
Body movement in art becomes a living archive
A persistent thread throughout Citizen is Imhof’s fascination with body movement in art and the ways gestures survive beyond their immediate occurrence. Across two floors, monumental Wave paintings, bronze reliefs, crowd-control barriers, and a new four-channel film trace the passage from action to image, from presence to remembrance.
The exhibition returns to a question central to Imhof’s practice: how can an ephemeral gesture, sensation, or performance endure beyond its fleeting existence?
Anne Imhof’s performance recast through film and memory
Among the exhibition’s key works is Citizen (2025), a four-channel film assembled from footage recorded by a performer during four evenings of Imhof’s large-scale production DOOM. The film does not document a singular event; instead, it reveals recurring movements, subtle shifts, and accumulated traces across successive nights, positioning the body as a vessel of memory.
Here, the language of Anne Imhof’s performance enters cinematic territory while retaining its tension, intimacy, and emotional force.
Waves, barriers, and figures suspended between presence and absence
Highlights include the monumental paintings The Lake of My Mother’s Tears (2025) and You Are Queen so I Will Bow to You (2026). Derived from digitally composed imagery and meticulously rendered in oil, the crashing waves hover between motion and stillness. Scratched markings cut across the surfaces, preserving evidence of gesture and physical energy.
Elsewhere, Girl in Leotard (2025), a bronze relief of a seated female figure, navigates themes of vulnerability, desire, and embodiment. Throughout the galleries, barrier sculptures redirect movement and shape the visitor’s path, reinforcing Imhof’s enduring interest in control, restriction, and bodily navigation through space.
A reflection on mortality, desire, and the human condition
Drawing on the medieval tradition of the Danse Macabre, Citizen considers mortality, desire, and the fragile nature of identity. Figures hover between appearance and disappearance, while architectural interventions continually recalibrate the viewer’s relationship to the works.
Like much of Imhof’s multidisciplinary practice, the exhibition resists definitive interpretation. Instead, it creates a charged terrain where painting, sculpture, film, and performance intersect, revealing the body as both witness and repository of lived experience.
Anne Imhof: Citizen, Installation view, SPRÜTH MAGERS
Photography by BEN WESTOBY / FINE ART DOCUMENTATION
Courtesy of ANNE IMHOF and SPRÜTH MAGERS
