Andrea Bender, born in the Hessian town of Schotten in 1972, knew she wanted to become an artist while she was still in high school. Right after she had finished school she began to study art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main with no less than Jörg Immendorf in 1993. After she had transferred to the class of Alf Schuler at the Kassel Art University in 1994, Andrea Bender enrolled at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in 1996, where Jörg Immendorff and Dieter Krieg were her teachers. In 1998 Krieg, who was one of the main representatives of New Figuration, accepted the gifted Andrea Bender as master student. In 1999 the young artist completed her education with a diploma from the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
At the beginning of the new millennium Andrea Bender made a name for herself with her painting. Numerous scholarships paved the path for her career during the first years, among them a travelling grant from the Düsseldorfer Kunstverein to Venice in 1999, a year later from the ‘Atelierförderung’ of the city of Duisburg and in 2001 the Scholarship Herrenhaus Edenkoben. In 2004/05 a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service took Andrea Bender to Vienna.
In her expressive paintings and graphic works Andrea Bender works figurative. Pompous architectures with disturbing elements and strange figures that seem to come from grotesque fairy tales emanate sharp wit and irony. A moved stroke of the brush and a subtle color handling add a very own notion to her works.
Numerous national and international solo shows, among others in New York and Amsterdam (both in 2010), have made her works popular with a wider audience. Andrea Bender, who received the Art Prize from the Röher Parkklinik in 2005 and the Dormagen-Guffanti Scholarship from the city of Cologne in 2008, lives and works in Düsseldorf and Duisburg.