Candida Höfer: Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2024

About

Candida Höfer's oeuvre, which has grown over five decades, is part of the contemporary photographic avant-garde. Her large-format works show public and semi-public spaces such as historical libraries, archive rooms, storage rooms, palaces, museums, opera houses, zoos and other buildings - places of encounter, communication, memory and knowledge, relaxation and recreation. But she also dedicates her own pictures to architectural details such as ventilation shafts or wall structures. Höfer's interest lies in the way in which people are guided, directed or held back by architecture and how spaces accommodate their visitors.

The twelve casts of Auguste Rodin's The Burghers of Calais, which are on display in museums and sculpture gardens around the world , inspired the photographer to create a series that she presented at the documenta11 in Kassel in 2002. She was interested in the contradictory nature of the spaces in which the casts are shown today; even during Rodin's lifetime there were controversial discussions about the "hero monument". The dialectic of tradition and modernity, of representation and use, is omnipresent in Höfer's pictures.

Work complexes are given geographically specific titles: Dresden (1999–2002), Weimar (2004–06), Louvre (2006), Portugal (2006), Bologna (2007) and Berlin (2020–22), including the Komische Oper and its neo-baroque interior and the Neue Nationalgalerie as Berlin's landmark of modernism. However, her topic is not the cultural differences between the spatial constructions that have developed over centuries; rather, Candida Höfer explores architectural concepts and how they manipulate human experience over time. The artist herself describes her works not as architectural photographs, but as portraits of spaces.

An accompanying publication with texts by Karin Sander and Matthias Sauerbruch will be published .

The Käthe Kollwitz Prize has been co-financed since 1992 by the Kreissparkasse Köln, the sponsor of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln.