Sex is the third of three chapters in a project commissioned by Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, Tate Modern, London and Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Part of the Espressioni exhibition project, the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea presents the first exhibition in an Italian institution dedicated to Anne Imhof (Gießen, Germany, 1978), the artist awarded with the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2017.

The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, objects, architectural elements, drawings and a sound installation that is inspired by the form of the public concert, as well as a performance. Through a curatorial experiment, Anne Imhof’s exhibition also incorporates some historical works of art belonging to the group exhibition Espressioni. The Proposition on dispaly at the same time in the Castello building and which effectively become the characters of the exhibition.The central sculptural element in Sex is a long glass and steel wall that Imhof stages in order to define the space in an ambivalent way. Untitled (Glass Wall), 2019-2020, is an architectural and sculptural work comprising glass panels mounted on steel bases. While reminiscent of walls, the barriers erected to manage crowds, separate and distance people in our cities, the “glass wall” negates their function, standing as a discontinuous, traversable structure defined by constant transparency. Like a long spine, the work runs through the entire space of the Manica Lunga, dividing it into two symmetrical corridors that host works displayed with the concepts of doubling and mirroring in mind.Sex comprises large-scale paintings that express the tension of the image and, at the same time, its possible destruction through a language that includes silkscreened portraits of women outside the fashion canons, the appropriation of photographs of nuclear explosions in the series Sunset (2019) and the use of scratches and abrasions in Untitled (2017-2019). There is also a large corpus of new drawings, specially made by the artist in 2020 during the lockdown in Berlin and in preparation for the exhibition, in which the attention to body language and the ways in which gestures draw space as mediated from digital communication emerges.

The exhibition Sex at Castello di Rivoli also focuses on a selected core of historical masterpieces from Italian collections that will be set up in dialog with the works of Imhof, contributing to deepen some of the themes underlying the artist’s work. Among the works on display are the painting Narciso (Narcissus), 1597-1599, by Caravaggio from the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, which invites a contemporary reflection on the question of identity and on the image today increasingly characterized by an exhibitionistic desire for one’s own image through digital technology. Other works on display include the San Lorenzo (St Lawrence), c. 1640-1649, by Jusepe de Ribera (Cerruti Collection) and Scena Allegorica (Allegorical Scene), c. 1521-1522, by the Mannerist painter Dosso Dossi (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice). The works La Maddalena penitente (The Penitent Magdalene), c. 1645, by the Baroque painter Andrea Vaccaro and Sansone e Dalila (Samson and Delilah), c. 1630-1638, by Artemisia Gentileschi courtesy of the Gallerie d’Italia, Naples, are also on display.