Candida Höfer Europa / America - Curated by Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Johnston Marklee

Sean Kelly is pleased to present Europa / America, Candida Höfer’s first solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, curated by renowned architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of the Los Angeles-based firm Johnston Marklee. Inspired by German-Prussian architect Erich Mendelsohn’s 1929 publication, Russland Europa Amerika: Ein architektonischer Querschnitt (An Architectural Cross Section), Johnston and Lee have selected fourteen photographs taken by Höfer between 1993 and 2015. Through Höfer’s carefully composed photographs of interior spaces primarily intended for entertainment, study, and worship, Europa / America explores sites that convey social significance in North American and European society. This novel grouping reveals a compelling impulse throughout Höfer’s oeuvre: to capture how architecture illuminates the cultural histories of a particular time and place.

Europa / America builds upon Höfer’s 2023 exhibition at Sean Kelly, New York, Heaven on Earth, curated by architect Toshiko Mori. While Heaven on Earth probed the vertical relationship between architecture and its transcendent, otherworldly connotations, here, Johnston and Lee have established a linear dialogue. The works on view span from West to East, with the front half of the gallery featuring North American interiors, and the back half consisting of European locations. The geographic dichotomy and shift mirrors Höfer’s journey in documenting North American spaces, after years of focusing on her native Europe. Despite this dichotomy, the photographs are united by Höfer’s distinct attention to symmetry, lighting, and an evocation of both vastness and intimacy, transforming each location into its own, complex world. 

Erich Mendelsohn’s monograph, Russland Europa Amerika: Ein architektonischer Querschnitt (An Architectural Cross Section), features images of architecture from New York City to Moscow after World War I accompanied by concise, poetic descriptions with a political bent. The works in Europa / America follow a similarly contemplative migration, a feeling that is heightened by their striking lack of human subjects. One of Höfer’s signature aesthetic choices, this absence inspires one to conceptualize the ways in which a space— whether a quiet library in Connecticut, or an ornate church in Düsseldorf—may inform the behaviors, movements, and psyches of its inhabitants over centuries.

The juxtapositions in Europa / America highlight one of Mendelsohn’s primary themes— that while economic, political, and social differences between Europe and North America persist, the societies are fundamentally intertwined, with one preceding another. Höfer’s Museum of Modern Art New York XII, 2001, and her Teatro Comunale di Carpi IV, 2011, exemplify this concept. The former, built in 1929, offers a glimpse into the quintessential modern American art institution, while the latter, a neoclassical Italian theatre constructed in 1860, evokes an older, more traditional cultural experience. The historical, transnational relationship is central to the exhibition, and to Höfer’s overall practice. With each photograph, the artist invites new eyes to witness places that will always be, in some way, of the past.