Portrait of a space

German photographer Candida Höfer continues her Italian travels with the exhibition A Return to Italy that is currently on show at the Ben Brown Fine Arts Gallery in London.

Following projects realised in Naples (with excellent portraits of the Teatro San Carlo and the Marcadante) and Florence — also presented by Brown in 2009 with the exhibition entitled Candida Höfer in Italy — the German photographer continues her tour around the Bel Paese. This time the artist has sought out significant locations in northern Italy: and while there is plenty of Venice and the Teatro La Fenice, in her journey around the north of Italy — like her predecessor Goethe — Candida Höfer has focused on gems in smaller cities such as the Teatro Scientifico Bibiena, the Museo di Palazzo d'Arco, the Museo Civico di Palazzo Te, the Palazzo Ducale and the Biblioteca Teresiana in Mantua; the Palladian Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza — with photographs of the proscenium and auditorium; the Teatro all'Antica and the sculptures commissioned by Vespasiano Gonzaga at the Galleria degli Antichi in Sabbioneta and the Teatro Comunale in Carpi. All are immortalised with her unmistakable style — her "German vision", as her gallerist likes to call it.

The Brown exhibition presents large-scale prints of 180 x 235 cm in six editions that seem to take up all the space in the gallery: white edges, a slender line of frame in pale wood. If you don't go too close, you feel like you're entering the picture, as what Höfer depicts is the architecture of absence. Before each of her works, the moment that she has experienced seems to live on; we are (with her?) in the place that is before our eyes, accompanied only by the architecture.

Rigorous, precise, neutral and methodological, obsessively attentive to how the light falls on the forms that interest her — but above all how she manages to touch our spirit — over the years Candida Höfer has developed her own recognisable and inimitable way of perceiving places around the world and transferring them to her camera — and on to us. Then again she graduated in 1982 from the Dusseldorf Kunstakademie in the tradition of the 1920s school of Neue Sachlichkeit ["New Objectivity"] and one of her professors was Bernd Becher. Just a few effective rules: photography must above all be balanced, the proportion exact, concise and direct (as she herself seems to be).

Höfer takes the most significant examples of architecture (from Italy, and not only Baroque architecture, rich in gold and splendour, like this last exhibition) to transform them into unique and unrepeatable works of art. In the case of Return to Italy they are well-known tourist destinations: anyone who has had a chance to visit them perhaps has a shot of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza in their phone. But while the object is the same, the result filtered by Höfer is certainly different, complete, true and suspended in time, in its degree of perfection. And this occurs not only with the historic buildings but also when Candida Höfer deals with contemporary architecture such as the Operahouse in Cologne, the Palácio do Itamarati in Brazil or a building in Essen recently completed by SANAA: her image holds intact a moment of the place as it is, with is grey and worn carpets, its unmatched seating. What emerges from her lens corresponds exactly to how that place should be recorded in the memory; in this simple yet solid intuition lies the hand of an expert.

The subjects vary and include many theatres (some of the most famous in Italy), museums like Capodimonte, historic palaces including the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, much-loved libraries such as the Marucelliana in Florence and the Nazionale in Naples. They are all public places, appointed to accommodate the public and the life of the city, even though there is no sign of human presence in the photographs. It is not necessary to add any drama: thanks to her undisputed and subjective objectivity, the supreme protagonists are the volumes and the exceptional effect that the architecture has on those who look at it through her images — perhaps the only detail over which Candida Höfer cannot exercise her control.

Through 12 April 2013
Candida Höfer: A Return to Italy
Ben Brown Fine Arts Gallery
Brook's Mews, London