Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Banco de España Madrid V 2000

Image caption
CANDIDA HöFER

Banco de España Madrid V 2000

  • 2000
  • Chromogenic print on paper
  • 120 x 120 cm
  • Cat. F_31
  • Acquired in 2001
By:
Carlos Martín

Candida Höfer’s photography has been defined as the portrait of an ‘absent architecture’, as she often returns to public or semi-public spaces with no human presence. However, the absence of people does not mean that there is no mark or imprint of the people who have passed through those spaces. On observing these images, It is as if people are expected to arrive and undertake and their everyday functions in the context of the institutional apparatus that they represent. The series of photographs taken in the Banco de España in 2000 reveals that same interest, with the added fact that it is an institution seen as a place that is difficult to access, even though it is public, given the security requirements inherent in its function. Höfer chose three groups of spaces according to their accessibility: two which are public (the main staircase and the library), two with limited access (the old historical archive and the entrance to the lifts to the Gold Chamber) and one whose use has varied over time (the Lobby at Plaza Cibeles, the main public entrance to the building before the extension opened in 1936).

In the Banco de España’s main building, Candida Höfer found a way to approach different types of spaces that she had already worked or would work on later. The libraries were the subject of a specific series, published in the Libraries monograph (in that same year photos were taken in Spain of the libraries of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial and the Sabatini Building of the Museo Reina Sofia, which has now been repurposed). Sometimes messy, at others coldly tidy storehouses for paintings again appear in her work in the Bilderdepot Sammlung Essl Klosterneuburg 2003 I (2003), as do representative spaces marked by a certain institutional pomp such as those she found in the aforementioned royal palaces in Spain, also in 2000. This all reveals her ability to apply an essentialist, searching eye not only to the architecture that is most conducive to it (that of the modernist movement and its derivatives), but also to a profoundly eclectic building such as the Banco de España.

Carlos Martín

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Candida Höfer
Eberswalde 1944

Candida Höfer studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1976 and majored in Films with Ole John; from 1976 to 1982 she studied Photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher. The influence of the latter was decisive in Candida Höfer’s shift from a more social style of photography in the 1970s to a style characterised by the starkness, simplicity and objectivity of spaces of public utility and representation, usually in the form of strict frontal takes with balanced compositions, high definition and meticulous images. Höfer photographs architectural spaces inside buildings with a great burden of history, public functions and cultural value such as libraries, archives, monuments, museums, galleries, churches, banks, etc. when they are empty, showing places and times that are usually inaccessible to the public. That turns architecture into a tangible print of the immensity of the memory that they contain. She is consistent in her work and faithful to her essence, which has made her of the one of the leading representatives of the Düsseldorf School.

In 1975 she began to exhibit at solo shows and her work has been showcased at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany, 1993); the Kunstverein Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, Germany, 1998); the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, United States, 2000); the Louvre (Paris, 2007); the Belem Cultural Centre (Lisbon, 2006); the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (Karlsruhe, Germany, 2008); Vigo Contemporary Art Museum (2010); the Andalusian Contemporary Art Centre (Seville, 2010); the Museum fur Neue Kunst (Friberg, Germany, 2011, 2012); and the Museum Kunstpalast (Düsseldorf, Germany, 2013-2014). She has also taken part in events such as Documenta 11 (Kassel, Germany, 2002), represented Germany together with Martin Kippenberger at the Venice Bienniale (2003) and was part of a group exhibition at the National Gallery of Art Washington D. C. (2016).

Roberto Díaz

 
«Architectures of Silence», Museo Municipal de Málaga (Malaga, 2001). «The architecture of Eduardo de Adaro and Banco de España», Banco de España (Madrid, 2023-2024). «The tirany of Chronos», Banco de España (Madrid, 2024-2025).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.