Burberry supports internationally renowned artist Anne Imhof for her exhibition « Natures Mortes » at the Palais de Tokyo.

For the Spring-Summer 2021 season, Riccardo Tisci, Burberry’s Chief Creative Officer, invited Anne Imhof to collaborate on a unique fashion show. Presenting a collision between fashion and art, the duo envisioned the show as a performance: staged for a digital audience, the show was conceived as an installation that explored freedom of expression, transforming fiction into reality as the real became unreal. It celebrated a union between the wilderness and the man-made structure.

STURTEVANT, DUCHAMP NU DESCENDANT UN ESCALIER, (1968/1996) Photographie collée sur papier / photograph glued on paper; 30 x 28.5 cm; Courtesy Estate Sturtevant (Paris) et / and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Londres / London, Paris, Salzbourg / Salzburg) © Estate Sturtevant ; Photo : © Charles Duprat

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 takes 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 especially the artist and musical composer Eliza Douglas, and thirty invited guests’ artists. After training in Frankfurt am Main at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, one of Germany’s most prestigious art schools, while immersed in the city’s club and music scene, the artist has established herself over a decade as a prominent figure in contemporary art through her radical work. Within the bared structure of the Palais de Tokyo, stripped down to its fragile carcass with its topography exposed, she fits a glass-walled maze that simultaneously fragments the space and generates new perspectives. Vanishing points and gaps are an invitation to dive into the darkness, down to the entrails of the Palais de Tokyo, to its underground. Tinged by shades of Baudelairian spleen, and by the dark romanticism of artists—from Goya to Géricault, from Piranesi to Delacroix—investigating 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. Inanimate objects, wilted flowers, burned-down candles or cans of evaporating liquid stimulate all our senses. They are a reminder that while the origin of still lifes lies in the theme of religious vanities, this allegoric depiction of passing time and death can also be a celebration of the living. It can stand as the affirmation of a matrix in which art conjugates the impulses of life and death, pleasure and anxiety, melancholy and energy. Raised fists (in German, Faust means “fist”), arched bodies and damned souls make these liberated, subterranean energies vibrate. The Palais’s architecture, transfigured by the artist into a glass palace, becomes a space in which temporalities collide, and, through an infinite play of reflections, apparitions and disappearances, it constructs an intermediary space between the interior and the exterior, from which new images emerge. Anne Imhof’s exhibition is an unstable form in motion, irrigated by bodies. The artist invites us to walk the space between life and nonlife, darkness and light, past and present, stillness and action, intensity and disenchantment, and to freely trace our own path across this vast, open scene. Haunted by painting, the fleeting cycle of life and the disruptions of the present moment, she comoses there in her Natures Morts (still lifes) – memento mori to the here and now.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, ANIMAL LOCOMOTION, PLATE 755 (1872-1885) Phototypie / Collotype ; 18,6 × 40,9 cm; Coll. Beaux-Arts de Paris (Paris), Inv. BIB 1173 T 3002-11-755 Photo : © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Beaux-Arts de Paris

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI, DIT PIRANÈSE, CAMERA SEPOLCRALE (XVIII E SIÈCLE / 18TH CENTURY ) Gravure en creux / Etching ; 40 × 27,3 cm; Coll. Beaux-Arts de Paris (Paris), Inv. Est2753 Photo : © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Beaux-Arts de Paris

OSCAR MURILLO, MANIFESTATION (2019-2020), oil, oil stick, cotton thread, and graphite on canvas, velvet, and linen, 250 x 270 cm.
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

ALVIN BALTROP, THE PIERS (MEN SUNBATHING ON DOCK) (N.D. [1975-1986]) Épreuve gélatino-argentique (tirage d’époque) / Gelatin silver print (vintage print); 11,4 × 16,6 cm Courtesy Galerie Buchholz (Berlin, Cologne / Köln, New York).

CYPRIEN GAILLARD, GREEN VESSEL STUDY (2020) polaroid, mat, aluminium and plexi frame, 103 × 73 × 4,5 cm (framed each). Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers (Berlin, London, Los Angeles). © Cyprien Gaillard

CADY NOLAND, TANYA AS A BANDIT (1989) Sérigraphie sur aluminium, tissu / Silkscreen ink on aluminium, fabric ;180 × 120 × 2 cm; Coll. Collection Udo und Anette Brandhorst (Munich) Vue d’installation / Installation view, Museum MMK für moderne Kunst ; Photo : © Axel Schneider

« Natures Mortes », Anne Imhof’s first retrospective in France will be open to the public from May 22 to October 24, 2021, in Palais de Tokyo, PARIS