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Eberrswalde, Germany, 1944. Lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
The recurrent subject on Candida’s Höfer work, since the 70’s, is the space that human beings produced trough constructions and the way they live on it. The artist puts herself in the spectator’s point of view that is at the same time the user’s point of view. Her work consists on identifying and perceiving the existence of compositions that existed before she was aware of them and that she leaves unabridged. Photographs of indoor spaces of public and semi public buildings were the order and disordered that derives from its communitarian function is revealed. The purpose of this examination is to visualize the architectonic space as a frame of human relations. Each one of the represented spaces in this corpus belongs to social space that is, a space that constitutes or is constituted by social relations.
The role of absence on Höfer’s work comes from her studies with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf, were she was a student along with Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff. In the majority of her photographs the chairs are as empty as the rooms and there are no human beings. Höfer presents a true topography, a defined knowledge of places. She photographs particular collective spaces: restaurants, dining rooms, waiting rooms, universities, libraries and museums. These spaces have a precise role in the mechanism of society, in a concrete and symbolic way, contrary to the no-places of the public space.
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