Marianne Hopf

Marianne Hopf was born in Freiburg i. Br./Germany in 1959. Her decision to study fine art was made early on, which she finally put into practice from 1982-87 at the Freie Kunstschule in Nürtingen. Her first confrontations with Abstract Expressionism and the then current art in the USA, as well as repeated work meetings with Emilo Vedova in Venice in 1985/86, are among her early influences, which have endured in an expanded and personalized form to this day. Various grants from renowned foundations (including the Berlin Senate, the Berliner Künstlerförderung, the Käthe Dorsch Foundation, the Kunstfonds Bonn, the Artist-in-Residence Program, Herhusid, Siglufjördur, Iceland and the Morat Institute for Art and Art Research Freiburg) have enabled her to work as a freelance artist in Berlin, New York and, since 2017, in Iceland. The artist lives and works in Lahr (Black Forest) and Berlin. With the means of painting and asking questions of wonder, the artist Marianne Hopf sees herself as a scientist of a special kind. Her attention to the world before 2017 – i.e. before her confrontation with the primordial nature of earth movements as they appear in Iceland – was more focused on the phenomena of growth as the basis of life. In Iceland, however, her world broke open almost literally: fractures and cracks underfoot, explosions and threatening weather events, lava fields stretching to the horizon and insurmountable abysses, in short, she found herself in the midst of the drama of the “sublime”, as Immanuel Kant might have summarized it. The monumental movements of the earth, in which people become small and at the same time feel part of the whole, allow their own inner state and the outside world to merge. When working, it seems to the artist as if her hands are the needle of the seismograph that records all the movements, and as if her psycho-physical reflections on these natural events become visible in the picture. Seen in this way, the artist becomes an exploratory mediator on the threshold between art and nature, between inner and outer movement, a moment on the wave between existence, transience and a new beginning. In the painterly gesture of imaginary, almost monochrome landscapes, she captures the fragility and magic of these moments. Marianne Hopf can look back on numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. She has been represented by LDXArtodrome Gallery since 2024.