Candida Höfer

The renowned German photographer presents five of a series of twenty-two architectural photographs at the Centre for Fine Arts.

Centre for Fine Arts I, 2006

The photographic oeuvre Candida Höfer has built up since the early 1970s constitutes an enormous catalogue of public interiors, libraries, theatres, concert halls, foyers and museums. She has already presented various cities in her work. In her new series, entitled Brussels Series, she now focuses on the capital of Belgium, photographing the Picture Cabinet of the Royal Library, the Royal Conservatory, the Centre for Fine Arts, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, the Monnaie Opera and the Flagey Broadcasting Building. The Centre for Fine Arts has the honour to première five of a series of 22 architectural photographs. The concert halls and exhibition spaces, the foyers and the hallways were submerged in the eloquent silence so typical of Höfer’s work and devoid of all human presence.

Candida Höfer’s oeuvre

Candida Höfer is the inventor of a remarkable plethora of public spaces, which, through the images she makes of them, become part of the top interiors in the collective subconscious. It is remarkable to see well known public buildings from our surroundings ‘represented’ in her photographs. We recognize the halls as if they were extremely detailed designs for the buildings, with perspective, lighting, colour and accentuated stylistic elements; in them we recognize their ideal form. Interiors are undone of everything temporary, fragmentary and transient; no human being is to be seen which could perturb the ideal form. In the social void of the interiors the buildings in Höfer’s photos are given their own voice. They express their own dignity, power and symbolics of the meaning for their existence, the pride of the societal group which once installed them, and possibly also vanity, that hair-fine moment at the intercept between style and decadence. The power of Höfer’s New Objectivity, as she learnt and developed from attending the Düsseldorf School, lies in finding the metaphor in the greatest possible purism, soberness and ascetic design. The photographic techniques of Candida Höfer reduce the buildings to their essence, into that for which they were once intended. In that sense, the interiors in the photographs resemble both the original design of the building as the monument of it, in one image the once-intended content of the constructor coincides with the historical subject matter, that is, the manner in which the interior was used and experienced for decades. Candida Höfer’s images create bridges; they relate the essence of a given place with a historical reality.

Brussels Series
Candida Höfer
Centre for Fine Arts, Brussel