Konrad Fischer Gallery is delighted to present the exhibition OPERA! OPERA!, showcasing photographic works by Candida Höfer (b. 1944). Widely regarded as one of the leading photographers of her generation, Höfer is internationally celebrated for her precisely composed architectural interiors. This exhibition presents her most extensive selection of opera house photographs to date.
Höfer's practice is distinguished by her meticulous documentation of public interiors, including opera houses, museums, theaters, churches, zoos, and libraries-spaces traditionally animated by social, cultural, and intellectual exchange. In her large-format photographs, however, these lively environments appear uninhabited, suspended in a state of stillness. Executed with exceptional rigor and precision-guided by Höfer's sustained pursuit of extracting and articulating detail-the rooms and architectural structures are not merely to be viewed as architectural photographs, but rather as portraits, revealing the distinct identity and atmosphere of each space.
The empty halls, foyers, fly galleries, prosceniums, and boxes, described by Okwui Enwezor as "anthropological spaces," appear distant and at the same time objectified, perfectly lit and balanced, but not staged. The viewer is aware that these photographs are the result of intensive, systematic research on the part of the artist and are by no means random images or snapshots of moments. The images are thus transformed from documentation into a kind of "deeply focused" and at the same time objective form of memory work.
Alongside the striking large-format photographs of major European opera houses-such as those in Milan, Venice, Lisbon, Dresden, Berlin, and Düsseldorf-the exhibition also presents more recent, partly small-format series depicting trees, light bulbs, zoological gardens, and libraries. All works were produced between the 1990s and 2023.
In 2002, the artist exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, and in 2003 alongside Martin Kippenberger in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The Cologne-based artist has received numerous awards for her work, most recently the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2024.
Her works can be found in numerous international collections, including MoMA, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Tate Modern, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Kunsthalle Basel, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
