For Her First Fashion Shoot, Provocateur Anne Imhof Links Up with Lotta Volkova

Though her work originates in drawing and painting, the German artist Anne Imhof is best known for performance pieces that test the limits of bodies in real time. Her first-ever artwork was a boxing match staged in Frankfurt’s red-light district, where she lives; the fight lasted four hours—as long as the band that Imhof cast kept playing. Imhof, 39, prefers to place audience and performer on equal footing, forcing both into the role of hyper-vigilant voyeur. Such was the case with Faust, her unsettling installation for the German Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, which earned the artist the Golden Lion, the exhibition’s highest honor. Faust featured barking Doberman pinschers behind anti-riot fences, and aloof, androgynous dancers in streetwear, who animated the pavilion’s imposing Nazi-era architecture by climbing transparent partitions, perching on platforms, and crawling under a raised glass floor. Among Imhof’s close-knit group of performers is Eliza Douglas, her fiancée and an artist in her own right. The couple have collaborated on Imhof’s works and costumes, and even on a painting-and-drawing exhibition that ran at Galerie Buchholz in New York this past fall; this portfolio for W marks their first joint fashion shoot. Douglas modeled for Helmut Lang as a teenager, and it was she who introduced Imhof to the fashion world, a week after the two met, in 2016, when the stylist Lotta Volkova invited Douglas to open Demna Gvasalia’s first Balenciaga show, in Paris. Then as now, Imhof was fascinated by the way fashion “is so in the moment but, at the same time, all about taking from history,” she says. How fashion uses color and form also intrigues her, as does “how it allows the person wearing it to be transgressive.” In these photographs, Imhof presents the androgynous Douglas as an unconventional kind of powerful woman, and references elements that frequently pop up in her work, such as translucency and tech gadgetry. (For Faust, she sometimes texted instructions to her performers that they were free to ignore.) Ultimately, the story is “an ode to grace and liberty,” she says, noting that Lady Liberty appears as her iconic image of New York. “In images I’ve seen, the statue has always looked so strong to me, but with Eliza standing there in this pose of a soccer player protecting his private parts, it becomes blurred in the background of this white morning light so that it looks almost fragile.”