Anne Imhof and Eliza Douglas Reunite onstage, and the Hudson Valley Keeps Expanding
A performance in Midtown Manhattan and a weekend of art upstate offered two very different views of contemporary art’s social life: one intimate, the other regional, both shaped by collaboration. At Performa’s Variety Show fundraiser at Town Hall, German artist Anne Imhof (b. 1978) and American artist Eliza Douglas (b. 1984) performed “For Real,” a duet adapted from Imhof’s DOOM. It was the first time they had presented the piece since its premiere at the Park Avenue Armory last year.
The reunion carried a particular charge because Imhof and Douglas were once both romantic and artistic partners. They met in Frankfurt in 2015 and went on to build a body of work that includes Angst at Kunsthalle Basel in 2016, Faust at the Venice Biennale in 2017, Sex at Tate Modern in 2019, and Natures Mortes at the Palais de Tokyo in 2021. After their breakup, DOOM became their first project together again. Even now, they are developing a larger new work slated to premiere in 2028 somewhere in Europe.
That sense of continuity, and the unease that can accompany it, gave the performance its emotional center. The pair had even agreed on a safe word before revisiting the duet, underscoring how carefully they approached the collaboration. What might have read as a simple reunion instead suggested a more complicated form of intimacy: one shaped by distance, memory, and professional trust.
The same weekend, Upstate Art Weekend pointed to another kind of art-world momentum. In Chatham, Jeremy Nedd presented “Slidin’ Thru” at PS21. In Claverack, the Campus, a former school converted into an arts space by six New York galleries in 2024, featured work by William Forsythe, Max Lamb, Pat Oleszko, Keith Haring, and Roe Ethridge.
Together, the two events suggest how contemporary art now moves between the city and the region, between performance and installation, and between personal history and public presentation. In both cases, the work depended on relationships — the kind that can fracture, endure, and return in altered form.
