Candida Höfer Käthe-Kollwitz-Preis 2024 | Führung für blinde und sehbehinderte Besucher*innen (im Tandem mit ABSV)

In the organizer's words:

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

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

Complexes of works are given specific geographical 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 theme is not the cultural differences between the spatial constructions that have been created over the centuries; rather, Candida Höfer explores architectural concepts and how they are used to manipulate human experience over time. The artist herself describes her works not as architectural photographs, but as portraits of spaces.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with texts by Karin Sander and Matthias Sauerbruch.

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