COLOGNE.- Zander Galerie opened the exhibition Between by Candida H鰂er, one of Germany’s foremost contemporary artists and a leading figure of the D黶seldorf School of Photography. Bringing together colour photographs from 1983 to 2021 that focus on spatial situations of transition, the exhibition has been conceived specifically for the gallery’s spaces in Cologne. Attentive to the inner structures they portray, the works sharpen the viewer’s percep璽ion of space and, in turn, heighten awareness of the interior surroundings in which they are shown. This is H鰂er’s fifth exhibition with the gallery, following her most recent presentation, Lumi鑢e, at Zander Galerie Paris.

The title can be read in more than one way, and the exhibition invites visitors to find their own. Those who step into the gallery will discover that Between begins at once, without preamble. It is a beginning best experienced in person. Composition and palette are pared back to the essential, and light is allowed to do its quiet work. In its entirety, the exhibition sets up a dialogue between pause and passage, stillness and movement, the known and the not quite recognisable.

Informed by the notion of visual memory and an interest in how people shape their environment, Candida H鰂er’s projects explore the aesthetics of photographed spaces. Since the early 1980s, the Cologne-based artist has photographed public and semi-public spaces of cultural memory and renewal such as libraries, museums and opera houses. The absence of people allows her to focus attention on the inner structures of the spaces without disturbing their visitors. Alongside the opulent colour and ornament of H鰂er’s classic symmetrical, central perspectives of halls and castles, the spatial situations that increasingly occupy her recent work are very reduced and in part abstract. Condensed sections and structures are portrayed in shades of off-white and grey, often from angles of ascent and descent. Refined, representative and enduring, at times monumental, the architecture appears still, yet it is often caught in a moment of transition.

What she took from Bernd Becher’s class, she has said, was above all how to see, taught less through instruction than through thought-provoking suggestion. Her process is one of dis璫overy through patient refinement. H鰂er describes spaces as carrying a time of their own, distinct from that of the people who use them, and hopes that viewers will take time to look.

Candida H鰂er was born in Eberswalde, Germany, in 1944. She first studied film and then photography at the Kunstakademie D黶seldorf, where she attended Becher’s inaugural class. Her honours include the Lucie Award and, most recently, the K鋞he Kollwitz Prize of the Akademie der K黱ste, Berlin. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Louvre, Paris; Kunsthalle Basel; the Hermitage, St Petersburg; and Museum Kunstpalast and K21, D黶seldorf, among other venues. H鰂er participated in documenta 11 and represented Germany at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Currently, Fotografiska Shanghai is hosting Candida H鰂er: Rehearsing Assembly, curated by Shen Chen, until 21 February 2027. The exhibition then travels to Shenzhen, where it will be on view at Fotografiska Shenzhen concurrently with Art Basel Hong Kong.