Candida Höfer valuation
Photographs libraries, museums, opera houses and reading rooms with nobody in them.
Candida Höfer was born at Eberswalde in Germany in 1944 and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, first film under Ole John and then, from 1976, photography under Bernd Becher, among the first of his students to work in colour.
What a work by Candida Höfer is worth
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Bio
Candida Höfer was born at Eberswalde in Germany in 1944 and studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, first film under Ole John and then, from 1976, photography under Bernd Becher, among the first of his students to work in colour. An early series photographed Turkish families living in German cities. The work she is known for, made since the late 1970s, is of public and semi-public interiors — libraries, museums, theatres, archives, banks, lecture halls and palaces — photographed frontally, symmetrically and almost always empty, so the architecture and the order it imposes become the subject rather than the people it was built for. She represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2003 with Martin Kippenberger.
The large prints are chromogenic, made in small editions and often in more than one size as separate editions, so title, dimensions and edition number together identify the work. Several interiors of the same building were often photographed on a single visit, and the exact title matters when identifying a print. At these sizes the practical risks are surface scratches, dents, fading and damage to the mount. Smaller prints and the earlier work of the 1970s and 1980s are a separate part of the output. Signature, title, date and edition are normally on a label on the reverse, and the studio and her galleries hold the edition records.
Cologne, Flipper and the Burghers of Calais
Höfer, the daughter of the journalist Werner Höfer, studied at the Kölner Werkschulen from 1964 to 1968 and worked for newspapers before Düsseldorf. Her early black and white work includes Flipper, of 1973, a collage of 47 gelatin silver prints of pinball machines, and her first solo exhibition was at Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf in 1975.
For Douze-Twelve, commissioned in 2001 by the museum in Calais and shown at Documenta 11, she photographed all twelve casts of Rodin's Burghers of Calais where they stand. She was professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design from 1997 to 2000, received the Sony World Photography Awards' Outstanding Contribution to Photography in 2018, and lives in Cologne.
Bokelberg, the zoos and On Kawara
After the Kölner Werkschulen Höfer photographed for newspapers, including a series on the Liverpool poets, and from 1970 to 1972 worked in Hamburg as an assistant to the photographer Werner Bokelberg, studying daguerreotypes. At Düsseldorf she and Thomas Ruff were among the first of Becher's students to work in colour, which she showed at first as slide projections, and in 1975 she and Tony Morgan shot a film in the Da Forno ice cream parlour in Düsseldorf.
The Zoologische Gärten series of 1991 turned the same frontal approach on animals in zoos in Germany, Spain, England, France and the Netherlands. From 2004 to 2007 she photographed On Kawara's Date Paintings in the homes of the collectors who own them, and in 2005 she began a series of empty galleries in the Louvre. Architecture of Absence, her first full survey in North America, opened at the Norton Museum of Art in 2006, and she received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2024.
Best auction results
- Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra IV £80,500
- Photograph, 2006 · London · 12 February 2015
- Publicly reported
- An auction record for the artist.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
