ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Born in Siegen in 1931, Bernd Becher studied painting and lithography at the State Art Academy in Stuttgart in the mid-1950s. Hilla Wobeser, born in Potsdam in 1934, trained and apprenticed as a commercial photographer. The two met at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1959, where both studied painting, and together began to photograph the industrial sites familiar to Bernd from his childhood. They married two years later. For the next four and a half decades, they collaborated on all aspects of their self-assigned project, documenting the lime kilns, cooling towers, blast furnaces, winding towers, gas tanks, silos, and other industrial structures of Western Europe. Once they had identified their subjects and obtained the necessary permissions, they traveled to each site, set up their large-format camera, and exposed the black-and-white sheet film, which they jointly developed and printed. Organizing prints into categories according to function, they emphasized a typological examination of structural form as a reflection of function in both exhibition and book formats. The Bechers’ first exhibition occurred in 1963 at Galerie Ruth Nohl in Siegen, and numerous exhibitions—individual and group, national and international, and organized by commercial galleries and museums—followed. Travel to some exhibition destinations expanded their repertory to include structures in Great Britain and the United States. They have been represented by Galerie Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf since 1970 and by Sonnabend Gallery in New York since 1972. The Bechers’ contributions to contemporary art have been acknowledged with numerous commendations, including their participation in the exhibitions in Kassel in 1972, 1977, and 1982; their representation of at the Forty- fourth in 1990; winning the Erasmus-Preis, the Netherlands’ most important art prize, in 2002; and being honored by Sweden’s Hasselblad Foundation Award in 2004. Not least of the Bechers’ legacy is their lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists who use the photographic medium today, most notably the students taught by Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy between 1976 and 1996. Among his most renowned students are , Candida Höfer, , and .