Candida Höfer at the Hilti Art Foundation: New Works
Die Candida Höfer’s crispbread dry statements in the film at the beginning of her show “Liechtenstein” in the art museum there and the Hilti Art Foundation do not have to be believed. You don’t even consider yourself an artist, you’re never interested in the technology of the respective camera, and after developing it, you’re often amazed that the rooms have become much lighter or darker. They also proceed very quickly, a maximum of one hour per session.
The film accompanies the “non-artist” in worldwide projects from 2012 to the present day, as she rushes into the most diverse rooms – castle halls, magnificent baroque libraries, nautilus-like spiral staircases – and takes a quick look around. And pulls the trigger. Either she works really intuitively, or the woman has an incredible eye, trained over decades. The training in the supposedly deviant Becher school may have helped to see the smallest detail, the ever unusual, in the serial more strongly.
Like a white and black Kaaba side by side
In the marble-white cube of the Hilti Art Foundation, Höfer goes in five specially for Liechtenstein created images to the conditions of storing pictures and books, thus inverting the theme of her large format library shots and making visible what is usually invisible. For example, she portrayed the depot of the museum in Schaanwald, in which, as in Tetris, the most diverse formats are neatly lined up upright in specially made climate boxes between pillars that are also cast with great precision.
The superimposed ceiling light from the neon tubes burns asymmetrical holes in the concrete, a white cable runs down the dark anthracite-colored pillar like a trace of painting. In front of a support on the right, a white floor socket gapes as another, initially inexplicable spot of light on the floor. The two somewhat grumpy installation details and the light holes stand in strange contrast to the national gallery-like clarity of the magnificent functional architecture in which smaller museums don’t store pictures but full-fledged exhibitions.
With this increased logistics of stacking volumes, the shelves always have to be hung at the same height per order Donald Judds not missing as a counterpart, seems too predictable when integrated. More cunning is the counteracting of the meticulous order recorded by Höfer in a not at all clean transparent transport box by the young artist Nina Canell in the purest dreamland of Liechtenstein. The Arte Povera sculptor of the dirt has installed a socket on the side of the slim Plexiglas rectangle, which electrostatically charges its walls and almost magically attracts the dust, which is basically not tolerated in either the museum or the warehouse, and thus the Sterility of pure geometry lustfully contaminated.
The five paintings by the Austrian abstract artist Verena Loewensberg from 1985 have a similarly anarchic effect, which, with their restless contours, seem to merge sheets of paper stacked on top of one another into a single-colored interior surface, in order to then connect it with the surrounding space, which is painted just as flatly. At the same time, Malevich’s squares are twisted into one another, drawing their tension from the indissoluble longing for balanced order and deviation. The strongest picture in the series, lemon yellow on the inside with a pale green frame, is also the last by the artist and is no longer signed.
The juxtaposition of Höfer’s view of the “Triesen art depot” – which museologists like to call “picture prison” because the paintings are locked on extendable wire mesh – and Giulio Paolini’s “Copia dal vero” from 1976 is peppered with allusions, because both pictures reveal through Conceal: The photograph presents almost exclusively empty frames, some of which are staggered into one another, as abstract rectangular shapes that themselves result in an image similar to that of Mondrian, who IS also represented in the show.