Untitled

Imbued with a dark side (that of Baudelairean spleen) and a sombre romanticism, Anne Imhof’s painting (born in Germany, in 1978) is provocatively disenchanted, haunted by the fleeting cycle of life and the conflicts of our times. The triptych is untitled perhaps because there were no words capable of describing the apocalyptic scene that unfolds here, where crepuscular atomic clouds seem to escape the frame. 

Anne Imhof dramatises her painting within a hermetic, in-camera space from which there is no escape. The vertigo it induces allows the aesthetic of the sublime described by the philosopher Edmund Burke to emerge, like a passion mingled with fear, faced with the Earth’s convulsive beauty and, equally, with Imhof’s acute awareness of the planet’s crises.