Candida Höfer

The German photographer Candida Höfer was born in Eberswalde in 1944. Like Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, she studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at Düsseldorf’s art academy, and is thus one of the important representatives of the Düsseldorf school of photography. She studied there from 1973 to 1982. Höfer is famous for her large-format photos of big halls; she avoids private spaces. Since the late 1970s she has been depicting theatres, museums and palaces empty of people. Her works have been shown in important national and international solo and group exhibitions, for example the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1991, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 1992, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1993 and the St Louis Art Museum in 1997. From 1997 to 2000 Candida Höfer taught photography at Karlsruhe’s Fachhochschule für Gestaltung, a design school. She is also a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste, the Free Academy of Arts, in Hamburg. In 2002 she participated in documenta 11, and in 2003, along with Martin Kippenberger, she represented Germany at the 50th Venice Biennale. Since 2010 Höfer has been a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, the Academy of Sciences and the Arts in North Rhine-Westphalia.