Anne Imhof Installs a Massive Steel Swimming Pool in Porto
The German artist’s first solo exhibition in Portugal is on view at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art through April 19
A few hours before opening her exhibition, “Fun ist ein Stahlbad,” at Porto’s Serralves Foundation, Anne Imhof realized that her newest paintings on view begged for a final touch. The Berlin and New York-based artist—who is globally sought after for her goth-infused mixed media work on belonging as well as attachment—grabbed the spatula and started scratching the densely black horizontal abstractions. Zigzagged and frantically energized scratches now imbue an instantaneous vigor and poetic chaos to the show’s monochromatic paintings. They sit alongside large-scale steel sculptures, bronze reliefs, a video, and a sound installation, all generously spread across the Álvaro Siza Vieira-designed institution, which is surrounded by an absorbingly lush 44-acre park and a farm designed by Jacques Gréber.
Imhof previously took similar jabs at lacquer and aluminum surfaces, but she tells Galerie that her first attempt at carving onto an oil-painted canvas propelled her to feel an immediate connection to art history. “The idea of hurting the surface and trying to discover what is underneath was an intuition to question mastership,” she says, and adds that she wanted “the actual surface to become less important and add a second layer that was abstract.”
Intuition is indeed fundamental in Imhof’s multifaceted practice, which has experienced incredible momentum in the last decade following her Golden Lion win in 2017’s Venice Biennale with her moody and performative German Pavilion installation, “Faust.” Bodies have since remained an essential pillar of the 48-year-old’s outings. From shows at Tate Modern and Palais de Tokyo to a recent three-hour all-encompassing performance, DOOM, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, corporality has manifested itself in punchy appearances of dancers in often freely choreographed numbers—at other times, the body lingers as spectral remnants in imposing sculptures and enigmatic paintings.
In Imhof’s first exhibition in Portugal, the body’s absence claims its own footing perhaps more grandly than in her former institutional projects. Anchoring the show is Imhof’s first outdoor sculpture of her career, titled Steelbath (2025). A grand swimming pool made out of dark steel, the statement sits embedded into the ground right outside the contemporary art wing’s lower floor. Visitors view the work through the gallery’s vast windows after encountering a group of hazily abstracted paintings in an otherwise empty space. The experience conveys a grabbing hollowness framed in perfect geometry, yet challenged by the limitedness of the sighting through the window. Devoid of water or bathers, the pool, with around a 6-foot depth, hums with an internal void; both inviting and sinister, the steel subterranean form is what the artist considers “anti-monumental.” The decision to refuse erecting a monolithic structure for her first outdoor commission is a bold one for the artist, who says, “negative space was a solution to monumentality and non-obstruction.”
Gradually painted by nature’s own patina, the dry hollow block is Imhof’s direct response to her exploration of Leça swimming pools designed by Siza in the 1960s during the height of António de Oliveira Salazar’s regime. Decades before the architect’s rise to a Pritzker-winning global household figure, the Porto local’s first major project in his hometown still operates as a popular community spot.
Although Imhof was initially invited to mount a show at the institution’s pink-colored Art Deco building, Casa de Serralves, a few visits to these historic pools encouraged her to take over the museum’s main building and propose a pool installation. “Anne was impressed by the building’s precision and calmness,” explains the show’s curator, Inês Grosso. She remembers that Imhof’s strolls around the galleries when the museum had the artist duo Allora Calzadilla’s interventions on view in 2023 allowed her to see the space through a new lens. After exhibiting canonized doyennes such as Alexander Calder and Louise Bourgeois at Serralves, Grosso believes in the cruciality of carving room for contemporary artists whose practices are “still unfolding, and they are taking risks to find their place in the industry.”
Besides the show’s tour de force that is the pool, this dedication to push the envelope in scale and narrative is evident in Tower (2025), a colossal steel structure that replicates ambitiously tall jumping boards, common in public pools. Perplexing and removed from function, the cross-legged staircase here rises inside the gallery without a body of water to accompany. Like a monster with raised limbs, the black sculpture stands as a witness to bygone plunges, experienced collectively on diving boards which Imhof encountered near Porto. Absent but also hidden in the sculpture’s grandiosity, a jump remains implied, just like the outdoor pool’s echoing of togetherness and chance encounters.
“Anne Imhof: Fun ist ein Stahlbad” is on view at Serralves Foundation until April 19, 2026.