Sonja Knoop

Sonja Knoop was born in Lübeck in 1964. Since 2008, she has been intensively involved with experimental painting. Since 2012, she has run her own studio in Neustadt/Holstein. After a pivotal encounter with the artist Alexander Ignatkov, who also became her teacher for four years, she founded her own painting school in 2015. In 2017, she was accepted into the Creative Alliance of Russian Artists, which also awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2023. Sonja Knoop paints and experiments with all types of materials, including cracking and chemical reactions with acids, hardware store chemicals, and foreign materials (sand, plaster, metal shavings). She describes the aesthetic result as a “poetics of the transient” and writes: “Rusty oxidations speak of time, flaking varnishes become maps of memory, artificially accelerated patina refers to archaeological finds. Here, painting is not a depiction, but a phenomenology of the material itself.” Sometimes it’s found objects like her “century walls” that inspire her to create an entire series. Other criteria for series can simply be the size of her works, such as “large-formats” and “tiny-formats.” The series “The Beauty of Decay” is thematically structured. Her thematic spectrum ranges from topics around the urban, local, and human to tranquility, animals, and landscapes. Pure abstractions round out her portfolio. Sonja Koop has exhibited widely in Germany, as well as in Russia and India. LDXArtGallery has also represented her internationally since 2025.