The garden as a created cosmos, as a product of creative people, has undergone many changes over the centuries. The aesthetic development of gardens throughout the ages can always be read as a reflection and statement by artists on contemporary history, each with its own social, political and intellectual currents.

In her graphic works Stefanie Hofer has long been intensively engaged with these phenomena and complex processes of development. The focus is on contemporary gardens whose creators - writers and artists, architects and landscape architects - come from different cultural contexts. These gardens are in very different ways aesthetic "Gesamtkunstwerke" and, with their clear spatial concepts, their intellectual and lyrical approach, incorporate both cultural-historical aspects and a broad spectrum of contemporary historical themes and questions.

Stefanie Hofer collects material on her travels and stays in the gardens on site in her studio. Sketches and photographic representations are changed, staged and a new pictorial space is developed. First designed as a hand drawing, then transferred to the copper plate, the picture is etched step by step into the plate using the painterly process of the aquatint technique.

Stefanie Hofer's graphic pictures are - not least because of their size - perceived by the viewer as opening spaces in space. The viewer enters into a relationship with these places, which have undergone spatial transformations, as it were, a stage set in the artistic process: from the actually designed nature of the gardens, whose contemporary and cultural-historical context still resonates, to the spatial scenarios of the aquatint prints, which allow the qualities of spatial depth, light and shadow, which are focused in the perception and representation of the gardens, to be subtly and precisely experienced.

Text by: Christiane Schachtner

Text courtesy Boutwell Schabrowsky.