hofer

The Standard Los Angeles III 2000, 2000

c-print

60 x 60 in. (152 x 152 cm)

Purchase, The Jane and Lawrence Acquisitions Fund

© Candida Höfer/Artists Rights Society, New York

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)

Candida Höfer attended at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1973 to 1982 where she studied film under Ole John, and photography under Bernd Becher. She currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany. In January, 2005 the exhibition Candida Höfer: Architecture of Absence, was presented at the University Art Museum (UAM). The exhibit, organized by the UAM and Norton Museum of Art, dealt specifically with the artist's architecture of interior spaces—public or institutional facilities—wherein the human presence is largely absent, although occupancy is implied by dense passages of information. Even the most ordinary spaces are granted qualities of infinite depth by Höfer’s view camera and Renaissance perspective.

One important goal of the exhibition was to give Höfer's work the exposure it deserves. To date, she is the only member of what might be called “The Becher Circle”—noted students of Düsseldorf’s renowned Bernd and Hilla Becher, including Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Axel Hütte—whose work has had little or no exposure in North America. As the oldest member and the only woman of this group of photographers, Höfer and her detached though exquisitely beautiful images add a meaningful layer of understanding with regard to both new photography in Germany and postmodern photography in its entirety, which remains missing due to the absence of opportunities to examine Höfer’s oeuvre in depth.

The exhibition included various series of work that emphasize her conceptual platform, which is one of categorization. Lecture halls, academic facilities, cafés, picture galleries, sculpture galleries, natural history museums, waiting rooms, and, perhaps her most admired works, the libraries, comprise cycles of ongoing examination of architectural space. The work was selected and divided according to these categories.

Included in the exhibition was approximately forty works selected by the co-curators in consultation with the artist. All works were borrowed directly from the artist's studio and her gallery in Cologne. All of the works in the show were reproduced in the accompanying catalogue, which is available on the Shop UAM link.