The focus of Stefanie Hofer's etchings is landscape: historically styled landscape gardens, contemporary land art objects that playfully engage with topography and space, and landscapes that emerge from industrial heritage sites. The artist travels to these sites, documenting and sketching them on location, and then processes this material in her studio. Through her drawings, she explores the conceptual world underlying these sites, formulating aesthetic, ecological, and thematic aspects into her own perspective.
 
Transferred to copper plates, the drawings become the foundation for painterly elaboration. Hofer uses the aquatint technique to etch the motif into the metal plate over the course of multiple steps, covering areas that should remain lighter by brushing varnish onto the plate and then returning it to the acid bath to achieve darker areas. Through this process she is able capture the subtle intricacies of the design, which are revealed only when the plate is printed on paper. Then the interplay of light and shadow, created solely in black and white with all its gradations, reveals the essence of these landscape sites. In large and small prints, nature becomes a stage as though arranged for the viewer—perhaps they will take something away from it, an idea or an inspiration for shaping the world.
 
Stefanie Hofer was born in 1974 in Munich, where she lives and works.