For more than forty years, Sophie Ristelhueber, 2025 winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Award, has, in her own  unmistakable style, explored the ruins and traces left by humans in landscapes devastated by war or natural disasters. She uses detachment, abstraction and formal beauty to evoke reflections on violence, memory and the scars of suffering.

Sophie Ristelhueber, has earned significant recognition in the history of contemporary art. A prominent figure in the field of photography since the 1980s, she has played a decisive role in establishing the medium as one of the arts, equating it with painting and broadening its scope to encompass sculpture, architecture and installation art. She is also the creator of artist’s books, sound works and videos. 

Current affairs, Ristelhueber has said, are not her domain; as an artist, she sees herself rather as dealing with history. Furthermore, she has completely overturned all the conventions as to how an image is presented,  experimenting with its material, its format, its status and the way it is displayed in the gallery space. For the Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon (macLYON), Sophie Ristelhueber has devised an unusual exhibition that will feature some sixty of her most significant works. She will also present a number of new works, including sound pieces that will provide a soundtrack to the exhibition.

Her work, has been exhibited in many international museums: MoMA (New York, US), ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), Tate Modern (London, UK), the Imperial War Museum (London, UK), in the Johannesburg (South Africa) and the São Paulo (Brazil) Biennales, as well as the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale (Japan); in France at the Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles, and, in Paris at the MNAM–Centre Pompidou, the Musée Zadkine, the Musée Rodin and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, where her work has entered the permanent collections.

Curator: Sylvie Ramond, General Director of the Pôle des Musées d’art MBA | macLYON, Director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon