Gretchen Hupfel was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1963. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA from Brown University before going on to earn an MFA from the University of Delaware in 1993. Hupfel taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and later at the University of Georgia in Athens. From 1989 to 2002, her work was shown in over 30 exhibitions in galleries and alternative spaces from New York to Atlanta. Her photographs are in collections including those in the Delaware Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, American Century, Citibank, Phillip Morris and Sprint. She has been recognized in Artforum, the New Art Examiner and Art Papers, among other publications.

It has been said that Hupfel made the invisible visible. Polaroid grids of telecommunication towers connected to each other with a web of precise, hand drawn lines show that the air is full of waves of sound bouncing all around and off us (in a series called Line of Sight); delicate white grids digitally overlay photographs of otherwise empty landscapes; an August 2002 sculpture titled The Negative Space of My Fist – a cast of the hollow of her clenched hand - "gives form to a tenuous grip on reality," as Gretchen would explain.

Gretchen Hupfel was graced with a sly, intelligent wit and her use of humor and paradox were equally important elements in fully realizing her profoundly insightful artwork. An in depth series of black and white photographs of airplanes in seemingly doomed situations are starkly beautiful and beguiling. Works such as (pilot error, induced), Touchdown (premature), and Wind Shear (unforeseeable) tickle us with the intellectual joking and leave us musing upon the more serious implications. Gretchen Hupfel’s art - pointed, poignant, resonate, playful - leaves us a tiny bit different, perhaps, than we were before.

In 2005-2006, Gretchen was the subject of a major retrospective at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Titled Time Spent, after the name of one of her enigmatic sculptures, the exhibition surveyed the full scope of the work of this artist, whose life and work far too soon came to an end, but who left a legacy of images and ideas that only seem to become more relevant as time passes.