Stefanie Hofer's etching 'Fragment' shows an installation by the artist Ludger Gerdes (1954 - 2008). On display is a stone ship embedded into the landscape, which the artist also described at the time as a 'fragment of a garden'.

Gerdes saw his artistic work as an open model, as a form of creating the world that can be read both from an architectural and a philosophical point of view. He explained this idea using the concept of the landscape garden, which for him is a formative part of modern society as an art form beyond the museum white cube, a flowing space that can incorporate elements of the most diverse artistic genres.

The work 'Fragment' is a homage to this artist and his appreciation of garden art. Stefanie Hofer's print works also show the potential of this often underestimated or forgotten art genre. She shows the garden as an open space for interactions and interventions, as a place that can merge poetics, aesthetics and play with functionality and everyday reality.

Her aquatint works show glimpses of these gardens, which she has visited, made sketches of, documented and shaped into a new, idealised pictorial space with her own eye. The black and white pictorial language and the painterly play of light and shadow direct the viewer's gaze to the essential: the garden is not only experienced as an architectural space, with its statements and references it becomes a setting/scene and - similar to a stage set or a play - a mirror for man/people in his/their being and acting.

After training at the Technical College for Wood Sculpture, Stefanie Hofer studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, initially with Albert Hien. She completed her studies with Karin Kneffel as a master student in 2015. Among other prizes, she received a scholarship for fine arts from the City of Munich and the Joseph and Anna Fassbender Prize from the City of Brühl.