You don't have to believe Candida Höfer's crispbread-dry statements in a film at the beginning of her show "Liechtenstein" in the local art museum and the Hilti Art Foundation.

She doesn't even consider herself an artist, is never interested in the technology of the respective camera, and after developing it is often amazed that the rooms have become much lighter or darker.

In addition, she proceeds very quickly, a maximum of one hour per session.

The film accompanies the “non-artist” in worldwide projects from 2012 to the present day, as she rushes into the most diverse rooms – castle halls, magnificent baroque libraries, nautilus-like spiral staircases – and takes a quick look around.

And pulls the trigger.

Either she works really intuitively, or the woman has an incredible eye, trained over decades.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In five images created especially for Liechtenstein in the marble-white cube of the Hilti Art Foundation, Höfer explores the conditions of storing images and books, thus inverting the theme of her large-format library photographs and making the usually invisible visible.

For example, she portrayed the depot of the museum in Schaanwald, in which, as in Tetris, the most diverse formats are neatly lined up upright in specially made climate boxes between pillars that are also cast with great precision.

The superimposed ceiling light from the neon tubes burns asymmetrical holes in the concrete, a white cable runs down the dark anthracite-colored pillar like a trace of painting.

In front of a support on the right, a white floor socket gapes as another, initially inexplicable spot of light on the floor.

The two museums stand side by side like a white and black Kaaba

The fact that Donald Judd's shelves, which are always ordered to be hung at the same height as a counterpart, is almost too predictable given the strict logistics of stacking volumes.

More cunning is the counteracting of the meticulous order recorded by Höfer in a not at all clean transparent transport box by the young artist Nina Canell in the purest dreamland of Liechtenstein.

The Arte Povera sculptor of the dirt installed a socket on the side of the slim Plexiglas rectangle, which electrostatically charges its walls and almost magically attracts the dust, which is basically not tolerated in either the museum or the warehouse, and thus the sterility of the pure geometry relish contaminated.

The five paintings by the Austrian abstract artist Verena Loewensberg from 1985 appear similarly anarchic,

which appears to have been stacked on top of each other, with its restless contours merging into a single-colored inner surface, which is then connected to the surrounding space, which is painted just as flatly.

At the same time, Malevich's squares are twisted into one another, drawing their tension from the indissoluble longing for balanced order and deviation.

The strongest picture in the series, lemon yellow on the inside with a pale green frame, is also the last by the artist and is no longer signed.

The juxtaposition of Höfer’s view of the “Triesen art depot” – which museologists like to call “picture prison” because the paintings are locked on extendable wire mesh – and Giulio Paolini’s “Copia dal vero” from 1976 is peppered with allusions, because both pictures reveal through Conceal: The photograph presents almost exclusively empty frames, some of which are staggered into one another, as abstract rectangular shapes that themselves result in an image similar to that of Mondrian, who is also represented in the show.

On the other hand, the opposite work by Paolini, to be translated “After Life” or “Copy of the True”, opens up a vertical, rectangular canvas picture in a medieval triptych form,

inverting the center panel, revealing the stretcher and unprimed dark canvas as the paint-inhaling 'inside' of the picture, while the side wings reveal the smooth white primed exterior.

Inside the central part, however, floats a flawless, pure white canvas, which the painter interlocks with the side parts like hinges through shadowy graphite hatchings - the outside world of the inside world of the outside world, so to speak, which Paolini here in the typical seventies style of the painful questioning of the picture and M. -C.-Escher-haft unfolds forever.