Selected Works by Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff & Hiroshi Sugimoto

The artworks on display focus on architectural photography, a theme that has regained a significant place in the world of art photography since the 1980s.

The medium itself, through its technical developments, has also favored the renewal of the genre and its diffusion, particularly through the use of new printing techniques. These enable, among other things, the production of large formats, which have allowed the medium to emancipate itself and thus reach a much wider and more demanding public.

In this exhibition, whether it’s Hiroshi Sugimoto’s theatre series, Candida Höfer’s interior views of the Paris Opera or Thomas Ruff’s architectural photographs, the artists focused mainly on architectural motifs. By diluting and blurring them to essentialize their volumes and light, or by amplifying certain details and playing with the multiple projection spaces, which themselves are staged inside the photographed places.

The interior views of the Paris Opera (2005), taken by the German photographer Candida Höfer, thematized the space of the stage and sets with a precision and a quantity of detail, amplified by the large format of the prints. The motifs in this series play on the variations offered by the presence of the different curtains and screens photographed.

This subject has a discreet affinity with the photographs of the Theatres (series started in 1978) by the Japanese artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto, where the scene seems reduced to a simple projection surface, like a metaphor. The lighting of the scenes is done by capturing the scattered light during the entire duration of a film screening. Here, the image is thus constituted in and through time, revealing an unreal atmosphere and the photographer’s fascination with light.

For his Architecture series (1997-2002), Sugimoto photographed various remarkable 20th century buildings, systematically following the same principle of focusing his lens. Through the analogical fuzziness obtained by doing so, the artist achieves a pictorial simplification in his search for reducing volumes to the essential.

In parallel with his l.m.v.d.r. series. (1998-2001), Thomas Ruff used a digital directional blur filter to capture the many patterns representing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s architecture. The dilution of the structures and materials of the motif also reflects the development of a new abstraction in Art Photography.