Candida Höfer: Inside Italian Architecture

The exhibition focuses on examples of Höfer’s large-format colour photographs of historic public spaces in Italy – among these 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 void of people and meticulously 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.