contemporary German photography – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘Image and Space. Candida Höfer in Dialogue with the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek’ at the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 25th March – 28th August, 2022

Curators: Ludger Derenthal, Head of the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek, and Ralph Goertz, IKS – Institut für Kun-stdokumentation

A special exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the IKS – Institut für Kunstdokumentation

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Liverpool IIA
1968
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 35.5cm

Twist of life

I am always fascinated by the journey that artists travel with their practice: where, when and why they started (what was their jumping off point, or point of departure): what were their concerns when they first started making art, what was the path they took, and how did they are arrive at their mature style.

With its blend of old and new – historical photographs by other artists that relate to the German artist Candida Höfer’s mature practice, and photographs from zoological gardens and hitherto little-known series from Höfer’s early work (such as photographs from her Liverpool series) that are archaeological evidence on the path to her current photographs – this intelligently curated and beautifully displayed exhibition investigates the narrative trajectory of discovery that any artist worth their salt takes during the development of their practice.

In Höfer’s art, her earliest photographs are classic black and white socio-documentary, urban landscape images that seek to map out the relationship between human and city, the topographical lay of the land if you like. For example, Höfer’s intensely personal views of Liverpool are full of fractures and half-seen occurrences in the urban landscape, observed with swift assurance by an inquiring mind, caught on the run. A woman peers in the window of a shop (Liverpool IIA, 1968 above), people queue to board a bus (Liverpool VII, 1968 below), men chat in a dingy bar (Liverpool VI, 1968 below), and a man is caught mid-stride legging it across the road while others what not so patiently at a bus stop (Liverpool XXII, 1968 below). Moving closer to the same bus stop (the same buildings in the background), Höfer captures a man standing looking for his bus in the middle of the street oblivious of the photographer (Liverpool III, 1968 below). This documentation of a fractured society continues in her series Türken in Deutschland (Turks in Germany)(1972-1979).

“Images of Turks at work or leisure in the parks, homes, markets, shops, and bars of 1970s West German cities populate Candida Höfer’s large, multiformat series entitled Türken in Deutschland (Turks in Germany, 1972-79). Höfer’s interactions with minority subjects in these images – by turns genial, jarring, and solemn – illuminate the complicated social and cultural milieu of 1970s West Germany… in Türken in Deutschland, Höfer explores the presence of Turkish migrants in 1970s Germany and how that presence was alternately erased and revealed in relationships with the dominant German culture…

Höfer’s Türken in Deutschland defies neat categorization: the images do not gawk at squalid living conditions or exotic cultural practices, or even feature dramatic expressions of emotion that might make particular images appear to symbolize larger issues. Instead, they express the frankness and intimacy of family snapshots, as well as an interest in new aesthetic mediums of the postwar avant-garde.”1

While both bodies of work predate Höfer’s “participation in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s groundbreaking photography course at the Kunstakademie”2, Türken in Deutschland by four years, there are already hints of her later mature style in photographs such as Kino Weidengasse Köln I (1977, below) with its cool frontality and observational, emotional reticence. But what Höfer’s early work possesses – and what I like so much and what has been lost in her mature practice – is that subtle, ironic, twist of life, twist of the knife (point of view) in which the artist focuses on the story and experiences of people living their life in the city.

Höfer is justly famous for her impartial, immaculate and still, large-scale interior views of architectural buildings – the artist frequently focusing “on places that preserve and order knowledge and culture… interested in how humans influence architecture through their culture,” working with light and space to capture the atmosphere and aura of a space through a “consistently calm and questioning archival gaze” – but what happened to the people in these people-less places, what happened to the sideways glance at life that initially inspired the artist, that propelled her forward into the world, that now no longer exists in the cold void of the building. Do I feel the aura of the space as the artist wishes, or do I miss the rupture, the wound, the punctum of dis/order that is the essence of fragmented memory, the essentialness of pattern/randomness.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Amy A. DaPonte. “Candida Höfer’s Türken in Deutschland as “Counter-publicity”,” in Art Journal 75, no. 4 (Winter 2016) published online January 6, 2017 [Online] Cited 10/07/2022

2/ “In fact, Bernd Becher invited Höfer to join his course after seeing the Türken in Deutschland slide show at the spring 1976 student exhibition at the Kunstakademie. The common desire of scholars to see this project as a slavish pursuit of the Bechers’ methods is clear in Astrid Ihle’s writings. Ihle describes black-and-white prints from the Türken in Deutschland series as primarily occupied with photographing “the order of things” – that is, with the “detached, cool view of an ethnologist” that defines the Bechers’ photographic “objectivity.” Ihle thus bends history to make a cohesive set of pictures taken in 1974, 1975, and 1976 examples of a method Höfer would encounter after starting the Bechers’ first photography course in fall 1976. Ihle, “Photography as Contemporary Document: Comments on the Conceptions of the Documentary in Germany after 1945,” in Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, exh. cat. (New York: Abrams, 2009), 186-205.”
Footnote 7 in Amy A. DaPonte. “Candida Höfer’s Türken in Deutschland as “Counter-publicity”,” in Art Journal 75, no. 4 (Winter 2016) published online January 6, 2017 [Online] Cited 10/07/2022

Many thankx to the Museum für Fotografie for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

With approximately 90 works, the exhibition at Berlin’s Museum für Fotografie opens up a broad cross-section of Candida Höfer’s photographs from 1980 to the immediate present. The long tradition of her architectural photographs, however, also extends deep into the classical canon of this field of work. In dialogue with pendants and counter-images from the Kunstbibliothek’s Photography Collection, Höfer’s particular approach to her pictorial motifs is revealed in a particularly impressive way.

Communicative function of constructed spaces

Spaces with communicative functions are paradoxically shown without the people frequenting them: Candida Höfer demonstrates the qualities or deficiencies of the spaces that enable human exchange in terms of the architecture itself, in terms of the atmosphere she specifically captures in each case, in terms of the perspective and the framing she chooses. She does not focus on the thematic groups serially; the respective locations determine the image format as well as the size of the prints. Yet the compilation of the groups offers a variety of possibilities for comparison that impressively confirm the photographer’s longstanding and sustained interest in the specific locations.

Images in dialogue

Some thematic groups exemplify the visually stimulating dialogue of the images: Facades, windows and doors open and close the view into or out of rooms. The dialogue between the pictures unfolds in a particularly attractive way in the photographs of Berlin’s Museumsinsel. While the razor-sharp, large-format contact prints by the Königlich Preußische Messbildanstalt still show the monumental staircase with Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s frescoes, Ryuji Miyamoto in 2000 captures the transitory state of the still ruinous building before the start of interior construction, and Candida Höfer in 2009 shows its completion.

Previously unpublished are Höfer’s colour photographs from her Liverpool series of 1968, from which a thread of development can be drawn to her images of the guest rooms in cafés, hotels, spas, and waiting rooms after 1980. They are brought into conversation with the more journalistically conceived street scenes of Willy Römer and Bernard Larsson, Dirk Alvermann’s images of Spanish bar scenes from around 1960, and Helga Paris’s photographs of Berlin pubs from the mid-1970s from the Photography Collection.

The photographer Candida Höfer

Candida Höfer (b. 1944) has devoted herself ever more and more intensively to architectural photography since her studies with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy towards the end of the 1970s. She has concentrated on this important genre without, however, acting on behalf of architects and art historians as photographers of earlier generations did. She sees her work as artistic photography, and photographing interiors was self-determinedly chosen by her as her main field of activity. She herself set the framework for it: “I photograph in public and semi-public spaces from different eras. This are spaces that are accessible to everyone, places of encounter, communication, knowledge, relaxation, recreation. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, since a few years, zoological gardens.”

Text from the Museum für Fotografie website Nd [Online] Cited 07/07/2022

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Liverpool XXII
1968
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 35.5cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Liverpool III
1968
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 35.5cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Liverpool VI
1968
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 35.5cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Liverpool VII
1968
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 35.5cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Liverpool VIII
1968
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 35.5cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Liverpool XXVII
1968
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 35.5cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Weidengasse Köln
1975
From the Türken in Deutschland (Turks in Germany) series (1972-1979)
Gelatin silver print
36.7 x 42.6cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Weidengasse Köln IV
1978
From the Türken in Deutschland (Turks in Germany) series (1972-1979)
Gelatin silver print
36.2 x 44.1cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Kino Weidengasse Köln I
1977
From the Türken in Deutschland (Turks in Germany) series (1972-1979)
Gelatin silver print
43.2 x 36.9cm

Installation view of the exhibition Image and Space. Candida Höfer in Dialogue with the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek at the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin showing at left, Architectural Record Shoe shop, Milwaukee (c. 1910, below); showing at centre back, Candida Höfer’s Bolschoi Teatr Moskwa II (2017, below); at third right, Reiner Leist’s September 24, 1996 (1996, below); and at second right, Florence Henri’s Parisian Window (1929, below)

Architectural Record
Shoe shop, Milwaukee
c. 1910
Gelatin silver paper
18.3 x 22.8 cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library New Haven CT I
2002
Colour paper
155 x 189cm

Above all Candida Höfer is famous for her large-scale interior views of libraries devoid of people… The artist frequently focuses on places that preserve and order knowledge and culture. Apart from libraries she also worked on museums or operas. She is interested in how humans influence architecture through their culture. Her photos are always determined by a cool sobriety. This is what they have in common with the photographs of the Bechers. However, Höfer always works with the light and the space present in each situation. She strives to capture the atmosphere and aura of a space.

Anonymous text from the Becher Class at the Städel Museum website [Online] Cited 27/12/2021

Reiner Leist (German-American, b. 1964)
September 24, 1996
1996
Gelatin silver paper
161.5 x 121.5cm

Florence Henri (French born America, 1893-1982)
Parisian Window
1929
Gelatin silver paper
37.3 x 27.5cm

Samuel Bourne (British, 1834-1912)
Temple, Mount Abu, Rajasthan
c. 1875
Albumen print
22.4 x 28.1cm

Fratelli Alinari (founded 1852)
Statue Gallery, Vatican Museums
c. 1880
Albumen print
32 x 41.6cm

This photograph is not in the exhibition, but two others from the series are… unfortunately no reproductions of those are available.

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
3 rue de L’Arbalète, Paris
1901
Albumen print
21.7 x 17.4cm

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Boutique empire, 21 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, Paris
1902
Albumen print
21.8 x 17.6cm

Frederick Henry Evans (British, 1853-1943)
An Open Door (Ely Cathedral)
c. 1903
Platinum print
25.8 x 17.4cm

Frederick Henry Evans (British, 1853-1943)
Westminster Abbey, London
1911
Platinum print
24.3 x 18.7cm

Bruno Reiffenstein (Austrian, 1869-1951)
Villa colony
Wien-Grinzing c. 1913
Gelatin silver paper
16.2 x 21.7cm

This photograph is not in the exhibition, but two others from the series are… unfortunately no reproductions of those are available.

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Kurmittelhaus Wenningstedt I
1979
Colour paper
40 x 52.4cm

Dirk Alvermann (German, 1937-2013)
Street café, Spain
1957-1962
Gelatin silver paper
20.3 x 28.5cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Wartesaal Düsseldorf III
1981
Colour paper
40 x 49.3cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Cafe Seeterasse Bad Salzuflen III
1981
Colour paper
39.8 x 50.3cm

Samuel Bourne (British, 1834-1912)
Inside view, Dilwara Temple, Mount Abu
1870-1880
Albumen print
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Museum A. Koenig Bonn IV
1985
Colour paper
63 x 81cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Institut für Versicherungsrecht der Universität zu Köln I
Institute for Insurance Law at the University of Cologne I
1989
Colour paper
63 x 81cm

Installation views of the exhibition Image and Space. Candida Höfer in Dialogue with the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek at the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin showing photographs from Höfer’s Zoologischer Gärten series
© IKS-Medienarchiv

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Zoologischer Garten London III
1992
Colour paper
50 x 66.5cm

Unknown photographer
Hagenbecks Tierpark, Hamburg
1906
Gelatine dry plate reprint
12.9 x 17.9cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Zoologischer Garten Paris II
1997
Colour paper
48 x 60cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Zoologischer Garten Hannover IV
1997
Colour paper
50 x 60cm

Candida Höfer explores built spaces in her photography. Her world-famous interiors focus on libraries, museums, restaurants, theatres, and other public spaces, allowing us to experience architecture in a new way. In comparison with photographic interiors from the Kunst-bibliothek’s Photography Collection, which is over 150 years old, a dialogue develops between applied photography and artistic work. The total of around 200 works – which also include photographs from zoological gardens and hitherto little-known series from Höfer’s early work, as well as their rarely or never before shown counterparts from the Photography Collection – invite visitors to take a new look at Höfer’s work and the Photography Collection, but also at the medium of photography itself.

Candida Höfer (b. 1944) has devoted herself ever more and more intensively to architectural photography since her studies with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy towards the end of the 1970s. She has concentrated on this important genre without, however, acting on be-half of architects and art historians as photographers of earlier generations did. She sees her work as artistic photography, and photographing interiors was self-determinedly chosen by her as her main field of activity. She herself set the framework for it: “I photograph in public and semi-public spaces from different eras. This are spaces that are accessible to everyone, places of encounter, communication, knowledge, relaxation, recreation. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, since a few years, zoological gardens.”

This list does not claim to be exhaustive; it refers above all to the communicative functions of the spaces, which, however, are paradoxically shown without the people frequenting them: Candida Höfer demonstrates the qualities or deficiencies of the spaces that enable human exchange in terms of the architecture itself, in terms of the atmosphere she specifically captures in each case, in terms of the perspective and the framing she chooses. She does not focus on the thematic groups serially; the respective locations determine the image format as well as the size of the prints. Yet the compilation of the groups offers a variety of possibilities for comparison that impressively confirm the photographer’s longstanding and sustained interest in the specific locations.

With approximately 90 works, the exhibition at Berlin’s Museum für Fotografie opens up a broad cross-section of Candida Höfer’s photographs from 1980 to the immediate present. The long tradition of her architectural photographs, however, also extends deep into the classical canon of this field of work. In dialogue with pendants and counter-images from the Kunstbibliothek’s Photography Collection, Höfer’s particular approach to her pictorial motifs is revealed in a particularly impressive way.

For the Photography Collection, architectural photographs formed the basis of its collecting activities. Designed as an exemplary collection, it was intended to convey to a broad public the special structural qualities of cur-rent and historical architecture as precisely and vividly as possible in photographic images in large quantities. The names of the photographers are not known in most cases of the many tens of thousands of prints in the collection. However, inventories and image comparisons have made it possible to identify groups of works by important representatives of the field, such as Eugène Atget, Frank Cousins, Samuel Bourne, Fratelli Alinari, Max Krajewsky, Emil Leitner, Felix Alexander Oppenheim, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Hugo Schmölz. In recent years, archives of the Schinkel and Stüler photographer Hillert Ibbeken, the Munich architectural photographer Sigrid Neubert and the Stuttgart industrial photographer Ludwig Windstosser have been added. The Museum für Fotografie dedicated comprehensive retrospectives to the latter two.

Some thematic groups exemplify the visually stimulating dialogue of the images: Facades, windows and doors open and close the view into or out of rooms. Candida Höfer presents the theme in an exemplary manner with two photographs of the Dutch embassy in Berlin. These are joined by a window picture of the classical avant-garde by Florence Henri or the large-format view from a high-rise onto the landscape of buildings of southern Manhattan by Reiner Leist from 1996. The dialogue between the pictures unfolds in a particularly attractive way in the photographs of Berlin’s Museumsinsel. While the razor-sharp, large-format contact prints by the Königlich Preußische Messbildanstalt still show the monumental stair-case with Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s frescoes, Ryuji Miyamoto in 2000 captures the transitory state of the still ruinous building before the start of interior construction, and Candida Höfer in 2009 shows its completion. Previously unpublished are Höfer’s colour photographs from her Liverpool series of 1968, from which a thread of development can be drawn to her images of the guest rooms in cafés, hotels, spas, and waiting rooms after 1980. They are brought into conversation with the more journalistically conceived street scenes of Willy Römer and Bernard Larsson, Dirk Alvermann’s images of Spanish bar scenes from around 1960, and Helga Paris’s photographs of Berlin pubs from the mid-1970s from the Photography Collection.

Press release from the Museum für Fotografie

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Rodin Museum Philadelphia II
2000
Colour paper
88 x 88cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Teylers Museum Haarlem II
2003
Colour paper
186.3 x 155cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven V
2003
Colour paper
103.5 x 87.7cm

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Hôtel du Marquis de Lagrange, 4 et 6 rue de Braque, Paris
1901
Albumen print
21.4 x 16.2cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven VI
2003
Colour paper
103.5 x 87.7cm

Unknown photographer (Ernst Wasmuth Verlag)
12 rue de Turin, Brussels
1899
Albumen print
24.5 x 33.7cm

Sigrid Neubert (German, 1927-2018)
Inner space, BMW Museum, Munich
1972-1973
Gelatin silver paper
22.1 x 15.9cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Palacio de Monserrat Sintra I
2006
Colour paper
254.4 x 205cm

Königlich Preußische Messbildanstalt (Royal Prussian Metrology Institute)
Stair case, Berlin
c. 1890
Gelatin silver paper
38.5 x 38.6cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Rossiskaya gosudarstvennaya biblioteka Moskwa II
Russian State Library Moscow II
2017
Colour paper
184 x 216.5cm

Installation view of the exhibition Image and Space. Candida Höfer in Dialogue with the Photography Collection of the Kunstbibliothek at the Museum für Fotografie, Berlin showing at centre, Höfer’s Bolshoi Teatr Moskwa II (2017, below); and at right, Höfer’s Malkasten Düsseldorf I (2011)
© IKS-Medienarchiv

Albert Vennemann (1885-1965)
Auditorium, Capitol cinema, Berlin
1926
Gelatin silver print
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek

Hillert Ibbeken (German, 1935-2021)
Rotunda, Altes Museum, Berlin
1999
Gelatin silver paper
23.9 x 30.3cm

Hillert Ibbeken (German, 1935-2021)
Rotunda, Altes Museum, Berlin
1998
Gelatin silver paper
23.9 x 30.3cm

Hillert Ibbeken (German, 1935-2021)
Rotunda, Altes Museum, Berlin
1998
Gelatin silver paper
30.3 x 23.9cm

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Bolshoi Teatr Moskwa II
2017
Colour paper
180 x 261cm

Candida Höfer, Portrait, © IKS-Medienarchiv

Museum für Fotografie
Jebensstraße 2, 10623 Berlin

Opening hours:
Tuesday + Wednesday 11am – 7pm
Thursday 11am – 8pm
Friday – Sunday 11am – 7pm

Museum für Fotografie website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘HIJACKED 2: Australia/Germany’ at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide

Exhibition dates: 13th May – 1st July 2011

Many thankx to the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Olaf Unverzart (German, b. 1972)
Untitled (from the series Fallen Kann Ich Auch Alleine)
1999
Pigment print
56 x 38cm/125 x 85cm
Courtesy of Oechsner Galerie

Narelle Autio (Australian, b. 1969)
Untitled 8 (from the series Not of This Earth)
2001
Courtesy of the artist

Jörg Brüggemann (German, b. 1979)
Nam Song River, Vang Vieng, Laos, December 2007
2007
C-type print
69 x 57cm
Courtesy of the artist and Ostkreuz

Ingvar Kenne (Australian, born Sweden 1965)
Nick Cave
2001
C-type print
100 x 100cm
Courtesy of the artist

Hijacked 2: Australia/Germany builds on the very considerable success of the inaugural exhibition, Hijacked 1 – Australia and America, and its internationally celebrated and hugely successful book. This new exhibition effectively considers two socially disparate nations, Germany and Australia, through an expansive photographic anthology of fascinating works, juxtaposed to suggest connections.

Hijacked 2 has been curated by Mark McPherson and Ute Noll and showcases the diverse talents and perspectives of thirty contemporary German and Australian photographers. With a focus on the depiction of the young, the boundary-riding, and the fringe-dwelling, Hijacked 2 is evocative, confronting, dreamlike and rousing.

Featured artists from Australia are: Narelle Autio, James Brickwood, Michael Corridore, Andrew Cowen, Tamara Dean, Suzie Fox, Lee Grant, Derek Henderson, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Ingvar Kenne, Bronek Kózka, Georgia Metaxas, Polixeni Papapetrou and Louis Porter.

From Germany the artists are: Johanna Ahlert, Natalie Bothur, Jörg Brüggemann, Thekla Ehling, Albrecht Fuchs, Jan von Holleben, Karsten Kronas, Anne Lass, Jens Liebchen, Myriam Lutz, Julian Röder, Josef Schulz, Oliver Sieber, Ivonne Thein, Olaf Unverzart and Sascha Weidner.

Hijacked 2: Australia/Germany is toured by the Australian Centre for Photography. A substantial 412-page publication accompanies the exhibition with texts by Uta Daur, Bec Dean, Alasdair Foster, Bill Kouwenhoven, Katja Melzer, Daniel Palmer and Katrina Schwarz.

Text from the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art website

Oliver Sieber (German, b. 1966)
Reita, Köln, 2007
2007
Pigment print
34 x 27cm
Courtesy Galerie Priska Pasquer, Germany

Ivon Thein (German, b. 1979)
Untitled 07 (from the series Thirty-Two Kilos)
2006
C-type print
55 x 80cm
Courtesy of Galerie Voss

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art
Hawke Building, City West campus
University of South Australia
55 North Terrace, Adelaide
Phone: (08) 8302 0870

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 5pm

Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘You Are Here: Architecture and Experience’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Exhibition dates: 5th March – 29th May 2011

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Ballettzentrum Hamburg III
2000
Chromogenic print
Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery

Inspired curating conjoins the monumental, classicist purity of Höfer with the picturesque, dystopian (dis)quietude of Gaillard in an exhibition that investigates our relationship to buildings and their environments and their relationship to us – the ‘i’ in our histor-i-city.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the Carnegie Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Cyprien Gaillard (French, b. 1980)
Belief in the Age of Disbelief (L’arbre incliné/étape VI)
2005
Etching
36 x 47cm
© Cyprien Gaillard
Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin, London

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Fundação Bienal de São Paulo XI
2005
Chromogenic print
81 3/8 x 71 7/8 in.
Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery

Carnegie Museum of Art presents the powerful work of two contemporary artists – Candida Höfer and Cyprien Gaillard – who explore architectural environments and how they influence experiences and perceptions of the world.

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” With that simple but profound insight, Winston Churchill conveyed people’s complex relationship to architecture: The physical form of a building is controlled by its designer, but the impact a constructed environment has can be unpredictable, emotional, and even visceral. That dynamic is evident in the upcoming exhibition You Are Here: Architecture and Experience, which brings together the photographs of German artist Candida Höfer and a video and etchings by French artist Cyprien Gaillard. Both artists express the formative power of architecture in different but complementary ways, according to Tracy Myers, curator of architecture at the Heinz Architectural Center and organiser of the exhibition.

Candida Höfer’s lush colour photographs of ornate historical and contemporary interior spaces are usually devoid of humans, yet they reveal details that draw the viewer into a consideration of what each place means. Höfer’s photographs usually focus on spaces of cultural and social activity. Printed very large (from about 4 x 4 feet to a massive 6 x 8 feet), the 17 photographs in You Are Here represent the range of Höfer’s work in terms of scale, point of view, building type, and geographical location.

By contrast, Cyprien Gaillard’s video Desniansky Raion and his meticulously detailed etchings probe the human legacy of Modernist high-rise housing blocks. Constructed after World War II throughout the United States, Europe, and the Eastern Bloc to provide decent housing, these buildings often became warehouses for the poor and incubators of crime and antisocial behaviours.

Named for an administrative district in Kiev, Desniansky Raion poignantly reflects on the gap between the utopian Modernist aspiration for universal housing and the banal reality that instead prevailed. It comprises three parts. In the first section, weekend fight clubs of 50 or 100 people face off against each other in a pugilistic ritual set against the backdrop of housing towers in St. Petersburg, Russia. The second part shows the implosion of a similar tower in Meaux, a small city near Paris; the demolition of the building was treated by the city government as a literal spectacle, with a light show and fireworks preceding the destruction. The final third is a very long panning aerial shot of seemingly endless ranks of virtually identical housing blocks in Kiev, Ukraine. The video is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Koudlam, a young musician born in the Ivory Coast. Also featured are six etchings by Gaillard, collectively titled Belief in the Age of Disbelief, in which the Modernist housing tower is placed in classic picturesque landscapes.

“Gaillard’s video packs a powerful and direct emotional punch: each time I view it, I experience physically the anticipation that ebbs and flows through the course of the work,” said Myers. “By contrast, Höfer’s photographs embody a kind of quietude that encourages slow, sustained exploration of the meaning that builds through accumulation of detail. But both works are equally affecting and bring the viewer with compelling intensity into the realm of architectural experience. Höfer and Gaillard capture the constant oscillation between what we make of our buildings, and what they make of us.”

Artists’ Biographies

Candida Höfer has been creating photographs for more than 30 years. Born in Eberswalde, Germany, in 1944, she studied with Berndt Becher and is identified with a group of German artists – Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Struth – best known for their unsentimental photographs of architecture, landscapes, and urban developments. Höfer has made interiors her focus.

Cyprien Gaillard, born in Paris in 1980 and currently based in Berlin, explores contemporary landscapes and buildings in a variety of media, including video, painting, and etchings. Much of his work is concerned with the legacy and inheritance of buildings and landscapes that are left to us, and the ways in which we interact with them.

Press release from the Carnegie Museum of Art website

Cyprien Gaillard (French, b. 1980)
Desniansky Raion
2007
Video still
DVD, 30 min.
Edition of 5
© Cyprien Gaillard. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin, London

Cyprien Gaillard – Desniansky Raion, Part 1, 2008

The video takes place in a parking lot of a drab housing complex in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he witness two large groups of men – one mostly wearing red shirts and the other blue – slowly walking towards each other. Set by Gaillard to the hypnotic electronic beats of French composer Koudlam’s I See you All, the video shows the colour-coordinated groups marching in loose formation, reminiscent of ancient armies confronting each other on some distant battlefield. Suddenly, signal flares billowing smoke arc through the air and the two groups come together, clashing in flurry of fists – a breathtaking display of raw physical violence set against the stark backdrop of the housing block. As the sounds of Koudlam’s pulsing music draw louder and more urgent, the furious hand-to-hand combat intensifies while bodies of the fallen lay strewn on the pavement. Before long, the blue faction beats a hasty retreat, only to regroup moments later on one side of a nearby pedestrian bridge. The two sides come together again, this time clashing on the impossibly narrow span of the footbridge. The blue group is once more chased off, and the victors in red erupt in victorious celebration.

Text from the YouTube website

Cyprien Gaillard (French, b. 1980)
Belief in the Age of Disbelief (Banja Luca)
2005
Etching
36 x 47cm
© Cyprien Gaillard
Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin, London

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Pinacoteca Querini Stampalia Venezia I
2003
Chromogenic print
60 15/16 x 73 in
Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Palacio Nacional de Mafra VII
2006
Chromogenic print
61 x 69 1/8 in
Collection Zibby and Andrew Right, New York

Candida Höfer (German, b. 1944)
Musee du Louvre Paris XX
2005
Chromogenic print
78 3/4 x 95 5/8 in
Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery

Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-4080
Phone: 412.622.3131

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

Carnegie Museum of Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Review: ‘presentation/representation: photography from Germany’ at the Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 3rd July – 30th August 2009

Curator: Thomas Weski

Artists: Laurenz Berges, Albrecht Fuchs, Karin Geiger, Claus Goedicke, Uschi Huber, Matthias Koch, Wiebke Loeper, Nicola Meitzner, Peter Piller, Heidi Specker.

An exhibition of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. (ifa/Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), Stuttgart, Germany and presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Australien.

I was looking forward to this exhibition and so on a cold and very windy winter’s day I ventured out on the drive to the Monash Gallery of Art in Wheelers Hill expecting to be challenged by a new generation of German photographers. I was to be sorely disappointed. This show, with the exception of excellent work by Andreas Koch and good work by Laurenz Berges, epitomises all that I find woeful about contemporary photography.

There is a lack of life and vigour to the work, no sense of enjoyment in taking photographs of the world. The narratives are shallow and vacuous inducing a deep somnambulism in the viewer that is compounded by the silent, deeply carpeted gallery making the experience one of entering a mausoleum (this is a great space that needs to be a contemporary space!). How many times have I seen photographs of empty spaces that supposedly impart some deep inner meaning? See how a great artist like Tacita Dean achieves the same end to startling effect with her film Darmstädter Werkblock (2007). How many times do I need to see ‘dead pan’ portrait photographs that are again supposed to impart rich psychological meaning? I have seen too many already.

Conceptually the work is barren. Technically the proficiency of some of the work is almost non-existent. If this standard of work was put up for assessment in a university course it would fail miserably. For example in Nicola Meitzner’s work Forward Motion (2006), vertical portraits (of the same person in different poses) and streetscapes of Tokyo are poor quality prints mounted in unattractive silver aluminium frames. They are forgettable. If an artist were to study the work of, say, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, then one might gain some insight into how to photograph the city and the people that live in it in a way that elicits a response from the viewer to the photo-poetry that is placed before them.

Uschi Huber’s photographs of boarded up shop fronts, while a nice conceptual idea, are again lacking in technical proficiency and are nothing we haven’t seen many times before while Peter Piller’s ten print-media type pigment prints of girls at a shooting range with rifles do not bare comment on both a conceptual and technical level. Similarly, Wiebke Loeper’s colour photographs of the city of Wismar – houses, roads, water, oat fields, people peering into shop windows – sent to friends living in Melbourne to show them the desolation and rebuilding of the city are seriously year 12 work.

The two redeeming artists are Laurenz Berges and Andreas Koch.

Berges four large type C colour photographs of an empty house and the surrounds as seen through a window are intimately detailed visions of human absence from the built environment: the huts, piles of wood chips, barren trees, the feathers on the floor of one print, the cigarette butts on the floor of another, the marks on the wall in blue and red add to a sense of abandonment and alienation from the environment – traces of human experience, identity and memory etched into the photographic medium.

As the text on the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA) website observes,

“Laurenz Berges is a chronicler of absence. His minimalist photographs point to the earlier use of spaces, only fragments of which are shown, whose inhabitants have put them to other, new uses. Berges depicts the traces of this change in austere images that, due to their reduction, tell their stories indirectly and almost involuntarily. These are stories about the existential significance certain spaces have for our identity, and also about their transitoriness and their loss.”1

.
The star of the show was the work of Matthias Koch. His five large aqua-mounted type C prints from the series Sites of German History (2006) are both technically and conceptually superb, full of delicious ironies and humour. Using an aerial aesthetic (apparently by climbing the ladder of a fire engine that he owns) Koch looks down on the landscape and through his images formulates new ways of seeing national symbols (even though many of them are not in Germany). His re-presentation of spatial inter-relations and objects embedded in their rural and urban surroundings are both simple yet layered and complex.

Unfortunately I have only two photographs (above and below) to show you of his work. None other was available but the images gives you an idea of his raison d’être. The specimen of U-995, built in Kiel in 1944, is presented as a trapped and mounted animal, preserved for our delectation and inspection with gangways and stairs to view the innards. Little hobby craft lie on a beach behind while people paddle in the shallows, a ship barely seen in the distance out at sea. The fact that this U-boat was once used to destroy such a ship, the irony of the proposition, is not lost on the viewer.

Other images in the series include a photograph of the derelict runway of the Heinkel factory as seen from above, the overgrown concrete slabs cracked and lifting, the edges filled with grass, the distant view dissolving into mist and nothingness. The photograph Harbour, Allied landing near Normandy, 1944 (2006, below) shows an American jeep and half-track of the period on the beach of the Allied landing in Normandy, tyre tracks swirling in the sand while in the distance the concrete block remains of the Mulberry harbour used in 1944 still litter the coastline. How many men, both German and American, died on this beach all those years ago? In another tour de force Atlantic Defence Wall near Cherbourg. Bunker construction built 1940 (2006) concrete bunkers dot the landscape with the beach and sea beyond as people sunbathe on the grass amongst the ruined bunkers, probably oblivious to the context of their surroundings. Koch is a master of the re-presentation of the context of memory, history and place.

Overall this exhibition is a great disappointment. I find it hard to believe that the exhibition has been curated by the same man who curated the recent Andreas Gursky exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. The choice of work and the presentation of technically poor prints is not up to standard. I also find it difficult to reconcile some of the reviews I have read of this exhibition with the actual work itself. Thank goodness for the photographs of Matthias Koch for he alone made the journey into outer Melbourne a worthwhile journey into the memory of the soul.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Anonymous. “Presentation/representation: Laurenz Berges,” on the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA) website [Online] Cited 08/08/2009 no longer available online

.
Many thankx to Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Laurenz Berges (German, b. 1966)
Garzweiler [surface mine]
2003
C print
130 x 171cm (51.2 x 67.3 in.)
© Courtesy Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Frankfurt/Berlin

This international touring exhibition was developed by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) in Germany and is presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Australien.

MGA is hosting the important international exhibition ‘presentation / representation: photography from Germany’, which brings to Melbourne the work of ten of Germany’s best contemporary photographers.

presentation/representation is curated by Thomas Weski (curator of Andreas Gursky recently seen at the National Gallery of Victoria), and covers the work of the generation of German photographers that has followed the now-legendary Kunstakademie Düsseldorf generation of Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer. For the artists in presentation/representation, including Matthias Koch, Laurenz Berges and Heidi Specker, photography is a medium that has its own language and characteristics, and their work collectively explores the limits of the medium.

Shaune Lakin, Director of the MGA states “MGA is thrilled to present ‘presentation / representation’ and to bring to the people of Melbourne such an important survey of contemporary German photography. As well as providing a comprehensive survey of German practice, the exhibition will complement the experience of those who saw Weski’s wonderful Gursky exhibition at NGV. We are also delighted to host participating artist Matthias Koch.”

Koch will be presenting a series of public programs including an artist talk, student tutorial and a field trip exploring the industrial suburban sites close to the gallery. “With his critical interest in landscape, architecture and history, Koch will provide some wonderful insights into our local landscape for participants in these programs,” notes Dr Lakin.

MGA’s Education and public programs coordinator Stephanie Richter says: “This is a great opportunity for students and Melbourne audiences to meet one of Germany’s most celebrated contemporary photographers and to participate in the busy schedule of talks, tutorials and field trips with Matthias.”

Press release from Monash Gallery of Art website [Online] Cited 05/08/2019 no longer available online

Heidi Specker (German, b. 1962)
D’Elsi – Elsi 1
2007
Digital Fine Art Print
Courtesy Fiedler Contemporary, Köln
Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2007

Nicola Meitzner (German, b. 1969)
Forward motion
2006
From the tableau Forward motion
Pigment print
© Nicola Meitzner

Wiebke Loeper (German, b. 1972)
To the sisters of Carl Möglin
2005
From the series To the sisters of Carl Möglin
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2007