Artist: Candida Höfer (German, born 1944)
Title: Biblioteca do Palácio Nacional de Mafra IV 2006 (Library of the National Palace of Mafra 2006)
Date: 2006
Medium: Dye coupler print (chromogenic print)
Dimensions: 61 × 69 1/4 in
Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Ellen Philips Katz, 2025.3.3. Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts.

In 2006, German photographer Candida Höfer (born 1944) turned her lens on the Baroque library of the Mafra National Palace, a vast eighteenth-century convent and royal palace complex in Portugal. The resulting photograph, Biblioteca do palacio e Convento de Mafra IV 2006, now in The Block Museum of Art’s collection, captures the grandeur of this monumental site while emphasizing its silence and stillness.

The large-scale chromogenic print presents two tiers of curving bookcases lined with brown leather-bound volumes. A checked marble floor unfurls dramatically before the viewer, drawing the eye into the depth of the space. Two monumental black lecterns interrupt the symmetry, their dark forms standing out against the pale stone walls and ceiling. Sunlight spills in from the left, illuminating the white architecture and accentuating the quiet grandeur of the scene. Remarkably, the library is still protected by a colony of bats, which emerge at night to hunt insects that might otherwise damage the historic volumes—a reminder that even the most serene interiors have unseen life.

Höfer began her career as a studio assistant and newspaper photographer before studying under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy. Alongside peers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, she helped define a new, conceptual approach to photography rooted in rigorous typology and architectural form. Unlike her contemporaries, Höfer focused not on industry or urban scale but on the interiors of cultural institutions like libraries, museums, theaters, and palaces. Her long-running series Räume (Spaces), begun in the 1980s, typifies her interest in empty, public environments where human presence is implied but not pictured.

This photograph is the second work by Höfer to enter The Block’s collection, joining her earlier interior The London Library I, 2004. Together, the two works provide opportunities for students and visitors to consider questions of knowledge, architecture, and cultural memory across national contexts. Höfer’s images also resonate with other photographs of depopulated interiors in the collection, from Laura Letinsky’s meditative still lifes to Andy Warhol’s rooms, as well as with fellow recent acquisition Interior #12 by Trine Søndergaard. They invite dialogue with architectural renderings by Richard Haas and C. J. Yao, as well as vernacular photographs preserved in Northwestern University Libraries.

Höfer’s monumental images reward close looking. Her precise attention to light and space evokes the grandeur of eighteenth-century architecture while also prompting broader questions about absence and presence, the ways spaces shape human experience, and the symbolic role of cultural institutions in preserving knowledge.

In Biblioteca do palacio e Convento de Mafra IV 2006, Höfer creates not just a record of a historical site but also a contemplative space for the viewer. The photograph invites us to linger, to imagine ourselves standing within the quiet library on a perpetually sunny day in 2006, surrounded by centuries of accumulated knowledge. In doing so, it exemplifies Höfer’s broader practice: transforming architectural interiors into portraits of culture itself.

Biblioteca do Palácio Nacional de Mafra IV 2006 is currently on view at The Block through Winter 2026.

– Contributed by Kirsten Lopez, Curatorial Coordinator for Collections Information and Digital Interpretation

Works Cited

Lorch, Catrin. “Candida Höfer.” Frieze, 30 Jan. 2025, www.frieze.com/article/candida-h%C3%B6fer.