Anne Imhof: Fun ist ein Stahlbad, at Serralves

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DATE

18 Feb 2026

AUTHOR

Katya Savchenko

Anne Imhof: Fun ist ein Stahlbad, at Serralves

AUTHOR

Katya Savchenko

“Her new exhibition Fun ist ein Stahlbad at Serralves Museum – the artist’s first solo presentation in Portugal – seems like a different kind of project, one that is more difficult to approach from this familiar angle. It brings together several massive sculptures and installations, large-scale paintings, such as Black Wave (2025) and White Cloud (2025), bas-reliefs, as well as works on paper, all pieces sparsely distributed across a sequence of well-lit white-cube museum halls. Taken together, the exhibition looks clean, quiet, and abandoned – an impression supported by the structure of its largest works.”

Interpretations of Anne Imhof’s projects often begin by attempting to articulate embodied experience – feelings, impulses, reactions – in line with the character of her practice. Her work became closely associated with durational, immersive performance following the success of the four-hour FAUST for the German Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, which earned her the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Imhof’s performances are non-linear and elusive: actions may unfold simultaneously across different areas of the space, choreographed, alongside a pre-existing score, by the artist’s on-the-spot decisions made while observing performers and the public in real time. Her performative works remain perpetually in flux and, by design, are impossible to see in their complete form. More than that, no two viewers could claim to have the same encounter with an Anne Imhof piece. It is precisely here that the personal, feelings-based account comes in handy for a reviewer.

Even Imhof’s projects that took place without a direct performative element – such as YOUTH at Stedelijk Museum (2022) or Wish You Were Gay at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2024) – seem animated and unstable. She used scenographic strategies such as dramatic lighting, music, and spatial segmentation to stage her exhibitions as environments of potential action, while her installations were designed to suggest that “someone was here and had just left”: a jersey lying on a bench, a locker left ajar, a creased mattress.

Her new exhibition Fun ist ein Stahlbad at Serralves Museum – the artist’s first solo presentation in Portugal – seems like a different kind of project, one that is more difficult to approach from this familiar angle. It brings together several massive sculptures and installations, large-scale paintings, such as Black Wave (2025) and White Cloud (2025), bas-reliefs, as well as works on paper, all pieces sparsely distributed across a sequence of well-lit white-cube museum halls. Taken together, the exhibition looks clean, quiet, and abandoned – an impression supported by the structure of its largest works. In Arena Crowd Barriers (2025) metal partitions form a closed circle, something like an anti-stage, whereas Tower (2025), a monumental sculpture resembling a diving platform stretches from the floor to the ceiling and is impossible to climb. This iconography, invoking discipline and control, is not new: crowd barriers and elevated platforms belong to Imhof’s visual vocabulary and have been featured in many of her previous performances and installations. What is new is their appearance as no longer intended for bodily use.

Tower as well as Stahlbad (2025) – another major piece within this show – draw on haunting images of a sports centre in Pripyat, Chernobyl, abandoned after the nuclear disaster of 1986. Commissioned by Serralves Museum, Stahlbad takes form of a black empty swimming pool installed outside of the main gallery spaces, in the patio. Its black metal mass bears a resemblance to a black hole, a vortex-generating void that serves as the climactic point of the exhibition, to which the visitor gradually descends from galleries located on higher floors. There might be, after all, a motion inherent to this exhibition: the all-paralysing magnitude of gravity.

“The viewer confronts a sculpture that already embodies control rather than being guided through it,” Imhof comments on the nature of the works in Serralves Museum in a recent interview with The Guardian. “The body becomes a site of thought, movement a form of intelligence – that is inherently political.” Her remarks invite speculation as to how the gravity of Stahlbad could be challenged. An emptied swimming pool is also the birthplace of skateboarding: discovered by Californian surfers, who used the curvature of the basin as a substitute to the shape of a wave they could ride. A popular subculture later institutionalised as a professional sport – a process that met resistance from within skating communities – skateboarding has also been examined through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s inquiry into the social production of space, as a practice of re-appropriating and rethinking relations between architecture and the human body. According to Iain Borden, who has written extensively on the subject: “In place of the organised cosmos of architecture-classicism’s cohesion, internalised hierarchies, imitation and balance, we have the waves, undulations, vibrations and oscillations of skateboarding’s ludic procedures, suggesting conflict and contradiction, emotion, chaos and confusion, the internalisation of the external world within the self, spontaneity and the affective.”¹ It may be a stretch to envision this exhibition as an invitation for skateboarders to settle within the museum – an option increasingly denied to them, as shown by the recent redevelopment plan of the famous skating spot in front of MACBA in Barcelona. Still, this reading might not be entirely misplaced considering Imhof’s interest in youth subcultures and her collaboration with The Skateroom (a certified B Corporation) as part of the exhibition – a series of skateboard decks she designed for the Serralves Museum gift shop.

Fun ist ein Stahlbad also features a new multi-channel video work, Citizen (2025). It is based on the footage from Anne Imhof’s most recent large-scale performance, Doom: House of Hope, which received mixed reviews, with critics picking up on discrepancies between the suggested political potency of the piece, its aesthetics, and the position of Imhof herself within the art world and celebrity culture. The title of the show Fun ist ein Stahlbad is borrowed from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in which popular culture is addressed as a means of administering pleasure: a numbing mechanism that reinforces conformity, while resistance and critical thought are relegated to the domain of autonomous art. What might this reference then convey for Anne Imhof – a world-famous artist whose practice traces trajectories of resistance and non-conformity and, at the same time, withdraws from cultural divisions? Within the exhibition Citizen is noticeably confined to a separate black box behind thick curtains. While the curatorial text suggests that Fun ist ein Stahlbad marks a summation of Imhof’s career to date, the project may instead appear as a testing ground where the artist seeks to confront the dialectics inherent to her own practice.

Curated by Inês Grosso, the exhibition is on view at Serralves until April 19.

¹Borden, I. (1998). Body Architecture: Skateboarding and the Creation of Super-Architectural Space in Hill, J. (ed.) Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User. London: Routledge, p. 208.

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