ART:
Candida Höfer
At Sonnabend Gallery
536 W. 22nd St., New York, NY 10011
nr. Eleventh Ave.
Candida Höfer’s intensely detailed, voluptuously colored pictures of interiors, libraries, and museums in Naples and Florence vie for beauty and greatness with Canaletto’s enticing pictures of Venice. At Sonnabend, I dissolved in front of Höfer’s recent large-format photographs of Italian ceilings and frescoes; I gaped in wonder at spread-eagled nude gods peering down from atop doorways, and wondered, Who walked these rooms, squaring the ideas of study and eroticism? Höfer’s visions of old books, ornate theaters, and opulent interiors (pictured, Biblioteca Dei Girolamini Napoli III, 2009) are full of details that turn into whole worlds. Even her stark picture of Michelangelo’s David is a wry feminist commentary on Thomas Struth’s more sensational image of the same subject. — Jerry Saltz NYMAG
http://www.artnet.com/sonnabend.html
