Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle is pleased to present Candida Höfer’s latest works in the exhibition “Dresden and elsewhere.” One of the most culturally rich opera houses in the German-speaking world, the Semper Opera in Dresden, was still missing from her series of interior photographs of world-famous opera houses. Last year, the artist succeeded in including the much-performed opera house in her œuvre. Candida Höfer was able to use several days of the theater’s summer break to take pictures with her large format camera. The result is fourteen spatial portraits that provide different perspectives of the stage, the auditorium, the workshops, the cloakroom and the staircase. The complete series has been on display since March in the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden alongside selected woodcuts, copperplate engravings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, Daniel Hopfer and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
In the solo exhibition “Dresden and elsewhere,” the selection of works in the Semper Opera is expanded to include two of Candida Höfer’s images taken in Liechtenstein in 2021. These works provide insights into the orderly archive rooms of the Liechtenstein Art Museum and the Liechtenstein National Library—a museum art depot filled with precisely lined up transport boxes and other packed works of art, as well as the library’s external depot with partially empty bookshelves. The essence of Höfer’s œuvre also crystallizes here. Large-format interiors of cultural institutions penetrate to the core of these architectural icons and make their temporality tangible. They are built, animated and maintained by people. Yet through the absence of these actors, Candida Höfer’s works create silent echoes, allowing the viewer to both find themselves and to trigger a state of humility within them.
Candida Höfer (*1944 in Eberswalde) lives and works in Cologne. The artist belongs to the first generation of the Düsseldorf School of Photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher and is today considered one of the world’s most recognized German photographers. In 1973, she started to study film at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and later moved to Bernd Becher’s class, where she graduated in 1982. Since 1985, her works have regularly been displayed at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery and have been shown institutionally worldwide, most recently at the Macao Museum of Art and the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden. Candida Höfer’s life’s work will be honored this year with the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize, and the associated solo exhibition at the Berlin Academy of Arts opens in September. (J. Singer)
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