Anne Imhof - Avatar II @ Sprüth Magers, 2023

Anne Imhof’s Avatar II exhibition at Sprüth Magers London last year felt expansive, hard-edged, and labyrinthine. The first exhibition to be spread across all 4 floors of Sprüth Magers’ London gallery (Sprüth Magers, 2023), as I walked through the corridors of metal lockers, benches, and paintings on aluminium panels, I was struck by an environment that I frequently associated with the visual language of masculinity: the locker rooms, the hard surfaces; the restrictive, angular passageways and various items of ‘black iron gym’ equipment that I’m so familiar with myself. I have always felt an affinity with environments of this nature, yet I haven’t always felt invited into such spaces, partly through my own visibly-coded gender (despite identifying as agender) and partly through my own traumas and the fear they have instilled in me. I have thought about this affinity a lot since I was a child, questioning whether it was borne of an internalised misogyny and conditioning to see the masculine as preferential, or whether I am truly embracing a duality within myself. I believe that, now at least, it is the latter.

While Avatar II wasn’t a show that directly concerned gender, it did directly lead me to think about my own gender expression and my use of hard-edged materials and of the large, overbearing sculptures I intended to make when resources would allow. There is what I consider a stark duality to my degree show piece and further planned works: the large steel frame covered in heavy black rope which is threaded through steel mesh representing my more stoic and resolute ‘masculine side’, while the video works, the sound and the bandages create a wild and untamed version of my angry, traumatised feminine aspects.