Monika Riethmueller grew up in Cologne and studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam, graduating in 1989. After long stays in Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany and she now lives and works in the south of France (Ardèche). "I try to evoke a visual poetry, wanting to invite the spectator to enter my world,  an animated world full of movement, with its personal aesthetic, with rough and confronting sides at the same time, delicate and almost tender. Neither background nor foreground; the elements of the composition – abstract shapes sometimes resembling floral or organic forms – are connected, they float in space, establish relationships between them – nothing is isolated. Parity of pictorial planes, parity of pictorial elements, controlled gestures versus random gestures, visible traces of a confrontation between the conscious and the unconscious." Her work - paintings, collages and drawings - is exhibited and collected internationally.