Anne Imhof Opens First Solo Exhibition at Portugal's Serralves Museum
New site-specific works including a 60-foot steel pool.
Summary
- Anne Imhof’s first solo exhibition in Portugal unfolds across the Serralves Museum and park with new, site-specific works including a 60-foot steel pool
- ‘Fun ist ein Stahlbad’ uses architecture and restraint to examine power, control, and contemporary anxiety
The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art has announced ‘Fun ist ein Stahlbad,’ Anne Imhof’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, opening December 12, 2025 and on view through April 19, 2026. The exhibition brings together a major body of newly produced works across sculpture, painting, film, and installation, created specifically for Serralves’ Álvaro Siza–designed museum and its 45-acre park.
Curated by Inês Grosso, the show is deeply tied to the site, using the museum’s architecture and surrounding landscape as active elements rather than neutral settings. The title “Fun ist ein Stahlbad” references Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment, where “fun” is framed not as freedom but as a quieter form of control. That idea anchors the exhibition, reflecting Imhof’s ongoing interest in power, anxiety, and the tension between promise and reality in contemporary life.
At the core of the presentation is a newly commissioned, 60-foot-long steel swimming pool embedded into the Pátio do Ulmeiro just outside the museum. The installation extends from the courtyard into the interior galleries, activating a space designed to pull the park into the building. Surrounding sculptures and paintings explore themes of abandonment, fragility and the emotional emptiness left by war and systems that fail to respect human life.
The exhibition also premieres “Citizen” (2025), a new four-channel film featuring performers, actors, musicians and dancers. Set on the stage of Imhof’s “DOOM,” previously shown in New York, the work reappears at Serralves as an undefined “house of hope” where architecture dissolves into something unstable.
‘Fun ist ein Stahlbad’ was developed over two years in close collaboration with architect Andrea Faraguna, with support from Sprüth Magers and the artist’s studio.
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art
R. Dom João de Castro 210
4150-417 Porto
Portugal
