Libraries: The Return

Candida Höfer’s exhibition “Libraries: The Return” opens – accompanied by a publication – after this year’s lockdown. The concept was created after the artist visited Gladbeck in May 2019; it includes a selection of works on international libraries and takes up the history of the building of the Neue Galerie Gladbeck as a former city library.

In recent weeks we have been surrounded by empty squares, streets, cities. Places of encounter, of cultural perception remained closed: museums, galleries, libraries. What the specialist for deserted spaces, Candida Höfer, has created in her works for decades has become everyday life, the places she photographed have become a social statement, a typology of social life, a model of crisis, Höfer’s works of art with divergent reception offers to a new reality.