Monika Kropshofer


Monika Kropshofer is a German painter and photographer. Since the middle of the year 2000 Kropshofer has gained renown through her large-format painted landscape and architecture photographs which were created as a result of her many work journeys and stays in Europe, Africa und Asia.

Life and work

From 1972 to 1977, Monika Kropshofer studied first Law at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz. After her two years as an articled clerk in Mainz, she worked as a lawyer from 1980, first in Mainz, then in Koblenz, and took her doctorate in 1982. In 1983, Kropshofer opened her own law office and was active as a court lawyer at the Coblence High Court of Justice. She terminated this activity in 1990 to study the History of art at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. At the same time, she worked as a freelance artist, finishing her studies in 1995.
Kropshofer began her autodidactic artistic training by experimenting with various picture material and bases. From the beginning, she turned her main attention to the combination of various media, especially photography and painting. Kropshofer projects landscape and architecture photographs onto the most varied kinds of bases and subsequently works on them with paint. Here, Kropshofer does without any additional digital picture processing. The photographs are taken during the artist's regular working trips and stays in Europe, Africa and South-East Asia. Since the mid-2000s, the works have become larger in format and more far-reaching and from now on, extensive installations and objects were also created.
Kropshofer's artistic discussion always turns around the formal dialogue between the object depicted and the media used. Her method for doing this is the construction and deconstruction of spatiality, depending on each picture basis and the revelation of the appropriateness of the structures in landscape and architecture with the help of painting. Thus her works are in the tradition of photography's very own discourse, the question of reproduction and reality, fiction and real life.
The artist lives and works in Boppard.

Works in public collections

  • Ludwig Museum Koblenz: Untitled , 2010, 70 x 100 cm, mixed technique on digital print on plastic plate
  • City of Grimmen: Untitled , 2007, 2 works, each 30 x 45 cm, mixed technique on photo paper
  • Goethe-Institut Taiwan: Untitled , 2007, 50 x 75 cm, mixed technique on photo paper
  • Museum am Strom, Bingen am Rhein: Untitled, Wernerkapelle I, 2011, 105 × 70 cm, mixed technique on digital print on plastic plate
  • City of Boppard: Boppard, Electoral Castle, 2015, 100 x 150 cm, mixed technique on digital print on plastic plate
  • Regional Authority Rheinland, Langenfeld: Untitled , 2016, 80 × 120 cm, mixed technique on digital print on plastic plate
  • Villa Vigoni, Menaggio: Untitled , 2017, 80 × 120 cm, mixed technique on digital print on plastic plate
  • Stadt Lahr: metamorphoses, 4 works, 2018, each 165 × 110 cm, mixed technique on digital print on multilayer plastic plates

Exhibitions (selection)

Literature

  • Beyer, Savoy, Tegethoff: Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, Volume 82, Berlin 2014.
  • Changing Dream Streams, catalogue of the exhibition of the same title by the two artists Monika Kropshofer and Elisabeth Bergner, Boppard, 2012,.
  • Interventionen: catalogue of the exhibition of the same title at the State Representation of the Rhineland-Palatinate, Berlin, 2011, .
  • Back to basics: catalogue of the exhibition of the same title at the Museum Boppard, Boppard, 2015, .
  • Architekturfotografie als Ausstellungsarchitektur, in: GDKE Rheinland-Pfalz, Landesmuseum Mainz : bauhaus - form und reform, E.A. Seemann-Verlag, Mainz und Leipzig 2019,.
  • Dialogo tra le antitesi, catalogue of the exhibition of Museum Crocetti, Rome, Italy, 2021.