Candida Höfer: Dresden and elsewhere

In the organizer's words:

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle is pleased to present the latest works by Candida Höfer 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 oeuvre. Candida Höfer was able to use the few days of the summer break in the theater's program to take pictures with her large-format camera. The result is a series of 14 spatial portraits that provide different perspectives of the stage, the auditorium, the workshops, the checkroom and the staircase. The complete series has been on display at the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden since March in dialog with selected woodcuts, engravings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, Daniel Hopfer and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

In the solo exhibition "Dresden and elsewhere", the selection of works relating to the Semper Opera will be expanded to include two works from Candida Höfer's photographs taken in Liechtenstein in 2021, which provide insights into the orderly archive rooms of the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and the Liechtenstein National Library - a museum art depot filled with precisely lined up transport crates and otherwise packaged works of art, as well as the library's external depot with partially empty bookshelves. The essence of Höfer's oeuvre thus comes to the point here. Large-format interiors of cultural institutions that penetrate to the core of these architectural icons and make their temporality tangible. Built, animated and maintained by people, but it is precisely through the absence of these actors that Candida Höfer's works create a silent echo that allows the viewer to locate themselves in them and trigger a kind of humility in them.

Candida Höfer (*1944 in Eberswalde) lives and works in Cologne. The artist belongs to the first generation of the Düsseldorf Becher School and is now considered one of the world's most recognized German photographers. From 1973, she initially studied film at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and later switched to Bernd Becher's class, where she graduated in 1982. Since 1985, her works have been regularly on display at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery and have been exhibited institutionally worldwide, most recently at the Macao Museum of Art and the Kupferstichkabinett in Dresden. Candida Höfer's life's work is being honored this year with the renowned Käthe Kollwitz Prize, and the accompanying solo exhibition at the Akademie der Künste Berlin opens in September.