Having risen to the pinnacle of artworld visibility over the last half- decade by choreographing highly Instagrammable performance pieces that engaged with the mainstreaming and exhaustion of subcultural spaces, Imhof executed a pronounced heel-turn this year, editing out her disaffected live performers and leaning into sculptural installation and ambient menace. The steely labyrinth of Youth at Amsterdam’s Stedeljik Museum was augmented with wintry, Moscow-shot footage of Imhof’s muse Eliza Douglas; meanwhile, the German artist’s darkly poetic shows at Buchholz in New York and Sprüth Magers in London felt like evacuated stages, foregrounding metal lockers (mostly closed) and multipanel paintings of billowing smoke. Imhof doesn’t seem wholly done with live events, but she told Monopol this year that her performances need, she thinks, to move outside of institutions altogether. And her work increasingly resonates in the worlds of fashion and pop culture. The artworld feted Imhof again this year – she won the €50,000 Binding Culture Prize – but it increasingly looks too small for her ambitions.