Anne Imhof. SEX, 2021 – Performance
Performance drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marcella Beccaria
Manica Lunga, Castello di Rivoli
September 25 – 26, 2021
Castello di Rivoli announces that the highly anticipated performance SEX, 2021, by Anne Imhof will take place on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 September, organized as part of the Anne Imhof. SEX exhibition (ongoing until November 7, 2021).
In conjunction with the performance at Castello di Rivoli, the new album SEX (by Anne Imhof, Eliza Douglas and Billy Bultheel) produced by PAN will be released at the beginning of September 2021, while the artist’s first single, Dark Times, part of the soundtrack created for the show itself, has already been released worldwide.
Imhof’s performative work is often visually described as a futuristic and nihilistic take on pop culture citing metal and grunge aesthetics, creating connections with the themes of classical painting. In the performative work of the artist, the concert itself becomes a visual language.
SEX refers to punk, industrial and grunge, boldly juxtaposing them with the music of the classical and baroque period. The amalgamation of genres contained in the album is also an integral part of the choreography of the SEX performance, where waltzes and tangos were contrasted with stage diving, slam dancing and moshpits to create a surreal ballroom, loaded with desire and aggression. Likewise, the record blends genres and styles to evoke an impressive array of moods. For more information click here.
The performance will take place within the exhibition itself which comprises large-scale paintings that express the tension of the image and, at the same time, its possible destruction through a language that includes silkscreened portraits of women outside the fashion canons, the appropriation of photographs of nuclear explosions in the series Sunset (2019) and the use of scratches and abrasions in Untitled (2017-2019). There is also a large corpus of new drawings, specially made by the artist in 2020 during the lockdown in Berlin and in preparation for the exhibition, in which the attention to body language and the ways in which gestures draw space as mediated from digital communication emerges.
The exhibition SEX at Castello di Rivoli also focuses on a selected core of historical masterpieces such as the painting Narciso (Narcissus), 1597-1599, attributed to Caravaggio from the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Rome, which invites a contemporary reflection on the question of identity and on the image today increasingly characterized by an exhibitionistic desire for one’s own image through digital technology. Other works on display include Sansone e Dalila (Samson and Delilah), c. 1630-1638, by Artemisia Gentileschi courtesy of the Gallerie d’Italia, Naples, Rinaldo impedisce ad Armida di uccidersi (Rinaldo Intervening in Armida’s Suicide), c. 1635-1639, by Gioacchino Assereto and San Lorenzo (St Lawrence), c. 1640-1649, by Jusepe de Ribera (Cerruti Collection).
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, states “When the Anne Imhof exhibition was inaugurated last fall, we were in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, so it was not possible to present the performance SEX which is an integral part of the exhibition. Now, thanks to the ongoing vaccination campaign and the containment of the virus, the Museum can once again host powerful and embodied events such as this performance, in which the main material shaped by the artist and her imaginary universe are the dynamics of social gathering. This fact makes the exhibition at once very topical and problematic and constitutes the first experiment in Imhof’s career to reflect on the contradictions of narcissism and the related mass loneliness typical of our era. Social gathering therefore becomes not only a literal part of her work but also the basis of her poetic universe.”
The exhibition is made possible primarily thanks to the contribution of the Regione Piemonte.
With thanks to Marco Rossi, Benefactor of Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, for his major support of the exhibition and performance.
Under the patronage of
The Narciso attributed to Caravaggio is on loan from Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Rome.
In collaboration with 
Thanks to Gallerie d’Italia and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per l’Arte for loans to the exhibition 
Thanks to BIG – Broker Insurance Group for supporting the insurance of the exhibition 
With thanks to Combo for the hospitality of the artist and the performers
Biography
Anne Imhof (Gießen, Germany, 1978) lives and works in Berlin and New York. Since 2012, her paintings, sculptures and her performances have been exhibited internationally. Monographic exhibitions have been dedicated to her at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021), Tate Modern, London (2019), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2019), German pavilion at the 57. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte – Biennale di Venezia (2017), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2016), Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2016), MoMA PS1, New York (2015), Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes (2014) and Portikus, Frankfurt (2013). In addition, the artist participated in numerous group exhibitions at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2019), Biennale de Montréal, Montréal (2016), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015) and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014). The artist represented Germany at the 2017 Venice Biennale, on the occasion of which she received the Golden Lion for the best National Participation. She also won the Absolut Art Award (2017) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2015). Imhof has been guest professor and artist-in-residence at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich (2015) and visiting artist at Städelschule, Frankfurt, Yale University, New Haven, and ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, among others. She composed the music for her works Angst (2016), Faust (2017) and Sex (2019) together with Franziska Aigner, Billy Bultheel and Eliza Douglas. In 2016, Galerie Buchholz released her first single Brand New Gods. In 2019 her first album, Faust, was released, produced by PAN. The new album SEX will be released in September 2021, in conjunction with the performance SEX at Castello di Rivoli, while the first single, Dark Times, has already been released worldwide.
TO DOWNLOAD THE IMAGES CLICK HERE