Candida Höfer: Contexts. Semper Oper Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden

In this book, an interplay unfolds between Candida Höfer’s 2023 photographs of the Semper Oper and selected pictures from Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, offering both deep insights into Höfer’s artistic practice and a reflection on the artistic representation of space. At once artist’s book and exhibition catalogue, this publication is both an exploration of Candida Höfer’s artistic practice and the contexts in which this practice takes place. In 2023, Höfer photographs in Dresden’s Semperoper: spaces of rehearsal, storage, performance, strolling and working in the opera house become a lens that reflects the view of the context of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in the Kupferstich-Kabinett as a place of research, collecting, archiving, exhibiting and working. The focus is on the period from the mid-16th century to the invention of photography in 1839 and includes woodcuts, engravings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, Daniel Hopfer and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, among others. Text: Jane Boddy, Doreen Mende