Deborah Schamoni

Anne Imhof’s art, her drawings, etchings, sculptures, installations and performances, emits a sense of affective physicality that renders all feelings, all emotions, all thoughts and all language, as affects; as forceful somatic bonds. A desire not directed at the viewer, but at nourishing its expansive stance. …… Imhof’s etchings on dibond, her sculptures and pencil, charcoal and pastel drawings are corresponding in the character of their mark making: a visual grammar of bruisings, of scratches, holes, bodyparts, appendages that appear as exhumations from a before implicit streak within our social order that here comes to a full aesthetic life. Imhof’s works are physical without being expressive, affective without being sentimental. …… Imhof’s is an aestheticism that expands via concentrations of brutalities and disidentifications, via their affective artistic affirmation and proliferation. Her show at Deborah Schamoni did thus not offer a subjectivized and expressive artistic signature, but a very powerful individuated structure of performance, objects, and drawings, which proposes an infinitely expandable affective aestheticism.

Text: Kerstin Stakemeier