Candida Hofer Depot Klotzsche IV

cm 60 x 60

During the 1970s, the artist was a student of the famous couple of photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. From the beginning of her career, Candida HÖfer has been connected to German conceptual photography and the tradition of the New Objectivity, a movement characterized by an apparent lack of emotional involvement in the choice of the subject photographed. From the 1980s, a typical theme in her work has been architectural interiors in public places. However, the artist chooses these specifically to represent a lack of human presence, the real protagonist and creator of those spaces, allowing the public to perceive only traces of it. Museums, theaters, libraries, banks, hotels, – often exalted in the photographic description of their meticulous decorative details – thereby lose their identity and primary function, becoming refined essays in the “psychology of social architecture” from which we glean models of logic in use, habitation, and living. As "Depotklotzsche IV" confirms, for Höfer photography is the ideal medium for capturing, together with the architectural quality of the places, their abstract atmosphere, empty and silent, aspects which are exalted through the choice of format, given that the artist further organizes the space through the camera lens. The storage area of the museum, in this case chosen as a subject, is portrayed in an objective and documentary light, consistent with the artist’s research, making up a piece of a very vast archive. The work shows the central aspect of all of Höfer’s work: verification and documentation, between real and conceptual, of the social and functional role of each place represented.

No

M. Kruger (ed.), Candida Höfer. A monograph, Munich 2003. M. Scluter (ed.), Candida Höfer. Photographs 2004-2005, exhibition catalogue (Hannover, Kestnergesellschaft; Cinisello Balsamo, Photography Museum), Munich 2005. Candida Höfer, exhibition catalogue (Naples, Museo di Capodimonte), Milan 2009.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Donation by Claudia Gian Ferrari

Photography