Anne Imhof: Youth

To engage the visitor’s senses, Anne Imhof appropriates a polyphony of disciplines. He brings together painting, installation, choreography and music. Often drawing on duality, Imhof finds inspiration in a broad cultural history, from Greek mythology and nihilism to underground culture. The artist addresses power dynamics, drawing on feelings such as hyper-individualism and loneliness, desire and greed, saturation and the fear of missing out. By translating these emotional states into his artwork, the artist captures fleeting moments rather than a single point in time. The artist constructs a dystopian underworld within the Stedelijk, through a vertiginous labyrinth built out of school lockers, evoking a feeling of anxiety and bodily dysmorphia. Inside its narrow passages, an Avatar watches, confuses the barriers and the changing light plays with our orientation.