VENICE.- Patricia Low Venezia has opened the exhibition “Inside Italian Architecture” by internationally acclaimed German artist Candida Höfer as third show at the new gallery on the Grand Canal in Venice, from September 2 to November 26, 2023 alongside the final months of 18th Architecture Biennale.

The exhibition focuses on examples of Höfer's large-format color photographs of historic public spaces in Italy – among them Rome's Villa Borghese, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and the ornate Fenice opera house in Venice, which lies across the water from the gallery itself in the San Marco district.

Photographed between 2008 and 2012, the works are characteristically empty of people and painstakingly composed. Interior architectural details, canonical paintings and sculptures, and rows of books fill Höfer's pick of Italy's palaces of culture, which seem simultaneously poised for activation by humans and redolent of their many past occupants. Shooting in natural or existing light and using long exposure, the windows and mirrors in these storied spaces attain a super-charged, almost auratic glow. In her work, Höfer skilfully captures both space and time, and something holy too.

Candida Höfer (b. 1944 in Eberswalde, Germany) lives and works in Cologne. Famously studying photography under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the 1970s, she developed a conceptual photography practice focused on the empty interiors of public buildings that nevertheless feel, in her framing, alive with a sense of presence. Her extensive list of major solo exhibitions in important institutions worldwide includes the Louvre in Paris, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Kunsthalle Basel, among many others. In 2003, Höfer represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and accolades, becoming, most recently, a Lucie Award Honoree in 2022; in 2018, she was recognised for her Outstanding Contribution to Photography at the Sony World Photography Awards. Her work is held in major collections around the globe, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in London, to name just a few.

Patricia Low Venezia
Candida Höfer: "Inside Italian Architecture"
September 2nd, 2023 - November 26th, 2023