Ingrid Hornef

Ingrid Hornef (born August 12, 1940) is a German sculptor, installation artist, curator and painter. She is a representative of Concrete art and became best known for using a dice as a random number generator in her series of works Alea iacta est (Latin for the die is cast). Ingrid Hornef acquired her professional skills as an autodidact and opened her own studio in 1985. In her early days, she was mainly concerned with pottery and attended ceramic courses in 1984 and 1985 with the well-known Japanese ceramic artist Takeshi Yasuda. In 1992 she took part in workshops by Mária Geszler Garzuly in Kecskemét , Hungary. Besides her work as an artist, Hornef is also active as a curator. In 2002, she initiated the temporary sculpture trail Land schafft Kunst (Land Creates Art) as part of the Rhine-Main Regional Park between Hochheim-Massenheim and Wiesbaden-Delkenheim. The area is a typical industrial landscape with seemingly intact nature, but at the same time there are high-rise buildings and high-voltage power lines that dominate the landscape. Hornef invited 21 artists to create their works especially for this place. In July 2019, Hornef organized a German-Greek–WWII–memorial and peace project named Building Bridges, together with city councilor Annette Courtis, who has Greek roots and who, like Hornef, lives in Hofheim am Taunus. In a small village called Chouni (municipal district of Agrinio), Greece, 16 German and Greek artists created works of art from sandstone under the direction of Hornef, in which they dealt with the history of Chouni during World War II. The village had been almost completely burned down by German soldiers in 1944. Parallel to this, lectures on the effects of the Second World War in Greece were held. The resulting sculptures were permanently installed on the village square in Chouni. In July 2021, a corresponding workshop took place in Hofheim, again led by Hornef. Here, too, the invited German and Greek artists formed works of art in which they dealt with the historical background of the time.