Anne Imhof

Anne Imhof was born in 1978 in Giessen, Germany. She attended the Catholic Marienschule and the Marianum in Fulda, completing her Abitur in 1997, and spent an exchange year at Prior Park College in Bath, England, where a teacher gave her daily private drawing lessons. From 2000 to 2003 she studied Visual Communication at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung Offenbach am Main under Heiner Blum, earning a BA. From 2008 to 2012 she studied at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main as a Meisterschulerin of Judith Hopf, graduating with the school's Absolventenpreis for her final project.

Her practice spans performance, painting, drawing, music, installation, sculpture, and film, though she has described her approach as rooted in the vantage point of painting even when the resulting work is a multi hour durational performance staged for a live audience. Early institutional exhibitions at Portikus in Frankfurt (2013), Carre d'Art in Nimes (2014), and MoMA PS1 in New York (2015) built her reputation, and in 2015 she won the Preis der Nationalgalerie for the installation Forever Rage, presented at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

In 2017 she represented Germany at the 57th Venice Biennale with Faust, a work performed by dancers moving above, below, and around a raised glass floor; the jury awarded the German Pavilion the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. She went on to major solo presentations at Tate Modern in London (2019), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2021), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2022), and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2024). In 2025 she staged DOOM: House of Hope at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, and her exhibition Fun ist ein Stahlbad opened at the Fundacao de Serralves in Porto in December 2025, her first solo exhibition in Portugal, running through April 2026. A solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers London titled Citizen opened in 2026, and a solo exhibition at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong has been announced for autumn 2026 to January 2027. Sources describe her current base variously as Berlin and New York, Berlin and Los Angeles, or, in earlier biographies, Frankfurt and Paris; she is consistently described as an active, living artist as of mid 2026.

Imhof's critical reception has centered on her fusion of endurance performance, fashion, music, and painting into large scale, often confrontational choreographed works. The Venice Biennale jury that awarded the German Pavilion the Golden Lion in 2017 described Faust, in language later recirculated by The Art Newspaper, as "a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions about our time," a formulation attributed to jury member Manuel Borja-Villel. That combination of formal rigor and unease has remained the throughline of critical writing on her work through her later museum presentations, including Tate Modern (2019), the Palais de Tokyo (2021), the Stedelijk Museum (2022), and the Park Avenue Armory (2025), each read as an extension of the same durational, tightly choreographed language she developed in Frankfurt and Berlin.

Imhof's market runs primarily through her two representing galleries, Sprüth Magers and Galerie Buchholz, and through the institutional exhibitions that have defined her career rather than through a deep or well documented secondary market. Public auction data for her work is comparatively sparse. The most clearly documented result identified is Beautiful Hole I, which Phillips London sold at a hammer price of GBP 10,160 in a New Now: Modern and Contemporary Art sale. Some market trackers cite a later, higher 2026 sale of an untitled work as her current auction high, but the price, currency, sale house, and exact date of that transaction are not confirmed in publicly available sources as of this writing, so it is noted here only as an unverified data point rather than a confirmed record.

Imhof's reputation is built on museum programming and gallery representation rather than a mature auction track record, and the absence of a published catalogue raisonne means provenance is best verified through Sprüth Magers or Galerie Buchholz directly. Publicly reported auction results for her work remain limited and inconsistent across market trackers, so collectors should treat any single quoted "record price" with caution until it can be confirmed against a primary auction house record. Her museum trajectory, from the 2015 Preis der Nationalgalerie through the 2017 Golden Lion to a steady run of major solo exhibitions in 2019 to 2026, is the strongest available signal of institutional durability.