Keeping a cool, quiet distance

If, as Matisse famously suggested, his art aspired to the condition of a good armchair, visually soothing and emotionally transcendent, photographer Candida Hofer’s compares to those handsome and severe Rietveld chairs, all straight lines and smooth planes -- a gift to the eye, hell on the rest of the body.

Hofer, born in 1944 in Eberswalde, Germany, is the subject of a survey exhibition at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach. Her first large-scale American show (it was organized jointly by the University Art Museum and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach), it includes 50 photographs that go back as far as 1979, though most date from the last few years.

Throughout her career, Hofer’s practice has remained fairly consistent. She’s photographed the interiors of public spaces such as libraries, universities, museums and palaces. With rare, minor exceptions, they are unoccupied, thus the subtitle of the exhibition: “Architecture of Absence.”

Surprisingly, the work evokes little to do with the psychosocial dynamics of vacant space. It’s not as much about physical emptiness as the deliberate filling of the visual frame. Hofer’s images exude balance and purity. What’s absent is not just people but intuitive feeling. The eye finds plenty to do, ample places to meander and rest, but emotions are left out in the cold.

Hofer has substantial company shooting in this way. The postwar pioneers of cool detachment in photography were Bernd and Hilla Becher, who since the mid-’60s have presented their crisp black-and-white typological studies of water towers and other industrial structures in neat grids. Bernd Becher started teaching in 1976 at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. Hofer enrolled in his first class and remained his student until 1982.

Other students of the Bechers’ (the teaching position was Bernd’s, but the couple taught and worked together outside the classroom) have made names for themselves on the international circuit: Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, to name the best known. Their subjects differ (portraits, museumgoers, urban and acculturated landscapes), but all apply a similar meticulous, unflinching vision and make impressively large color prints.

Hofer is a fine representative of the Becher school. She chose her metier and has largely stuck with it. She shoots straight on into a room or at a diagonal and occasionally adopts an elevated perspective. The interiors are not just unoccupied but usually untouchably pristine -- tables, chairs, papers or other contents in perfect order. While the chairs (often rows and rows of them) in these scenes are empty and open to us, they are not inviting.

University Art Museum curator Mary-Kay Lombino, who organized the show with emeritus director Constance Glenn and Virginia Heckert, the Norton’s curator of photography, suggests in the fine Aperture catalog that the empty chairs serve as surrogates for the users of the space and for viewers.

Mostly, the chairs feel like design elements. In an image of the Kunsthaus Bregenz (1999), for instance, a wall of windows reflects onto a broad stretch of smooth gray floor, the rectangle of light doubling into a luminous square. A long, solid bench near the windows helps articulate and anchor the nearly abstract scene. It functions like thread holding down a button. Similarly, in a photograph of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2001), a row of ottomans and benches bisects the spare modernist space with a touch of pattern, reading like a line of Morse code: dot dash dot dash dot.

Hofer favors places of unified design, where order is the defining principle, where classification and collection are the chief activities. To these typologically oriented spaces, she applies her own precise vision, distilling each environment to its geometric essence. Start looking for grids in the pictures and you’ll find them everywhere, not just in the obvious images, such as “Milchhof Nurnberg I” (1999), where the windows and balconies of a building form a neat nine-part grid, but also in shots such as “Schloss St. Emmeram Regensburg XXVIII” (2003), where the china settings on a long, vitrine-encased table look like modular units receding to infinity.

The clean lines of modernist architecture lend themselves especially well to Hofer’s vision. Her image of the Schindler House restates the structure’s dialogue between vertical slits of light and horizontal ceiling beams to elegant effect. Even when shooting ornate, baroque interiors, however, Hofer achieves images with extreme clarity and legibility. Her image of Venice’s Ca’ Dolfin (2003) reduces an opulent salon to three basic elements: the bank of crimson upholstered chairs below, the wall mirrors’ bluish reflections, and the ceiling’s huge chandelier, dropping nearly to the center of the picture like an elaborately encrusted icicle.

Hofer’s photographs can be spectacularly beautiful, both the images and -- scaled to 5 or 6 feet per side, as many of them are -- the prints themselves. Form and formality align within them as a powerful duo, integrating light, color, pattern, order, harmony and balance. Hofer has her system down cold, and that’s both the strength and the major drawback of the work -- its neutrality, its antiseptic perfection.

Matisse’s words come in handy again. His definition of decoration -- reduction to the essentials, emphasis on emotional neutrality -- fits Hofer’s work snugly. Matisse, of course, aimed to elevate the decorative to a higher, philosophical level. Hofer seems content with it as is, a negotiation of forms that “should interest the spectator, but never move him.”

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‘Candida Hofer: Architecture of Absence’

Where: University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays and until 8 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays. Closed Mondays

Ends: April 17

Price: $4

Contact: (562) 985-5761; www.csulb.edu/org/uam