Candida Höfer: a museum is the ghost, the dream and the memory of a lost ready made

Nowadays many exhibitions approach the ancient and the contemporary in a superficial way. They do not create an effective relationship between the past and the present. Contemporary works, for example, are too often set in archaeological sites or ancient churches which are used just like suggestive locations. Or we find exhibitions associating Renaissance masters and living artists purely based on formal similarities. A smarter way to relate antique and contemporary is instead what you can see in the exhibition titled “Candida Höfer for the Galleria Borghese” (until September 15 at the Galleria Borghese in Rome).

Seven photographic works by the artist Candida Höfer reproduce the original reconstruction of the Borghese collection, made possible by a previous exhibition, “The Borgheseand the ancient” (December 2011 – April 2012), which gave back to the Gallery the most important masterpieces of the art collection that belonged to the old one, for the most part collected by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in the early seventeenth century. Today these works embody the essential core of the antiquities in the Louvre (as a result of sales tax by the emperor Napoleon to his brother in law Camillo Borghese in 1807).

The works produced by Candida Höfer thus constitute the only existing record of the collection in its original layout, which can not be replicated ever again.

The concept of the show is that the reconstruction of a masterpiece of art, which was the collection of the Galleria Borghese in its original state, has caused a new work of art: a museum like the ghost, the dream and the memory of a lost ready made.

July 26, 2015