She received an MA from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 1982, and moved to Dublin in the same year.

For example, of the eponymous artwork in her 2013 show State at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), Dublin, art critic Cristín Leach Hughes wrote, "Nearly 2,000 tiny individuals are trapped, held with pins.

Stand back and they form the population of a spotlit planet, a floating sphere that points to man's ultimate insignificance.

In contrast to her later, more restrained pieces, those writing on early displays of Groener's work in Dublin were struck by the forceful imagery and execution, and greeted them as roughly belonging to the (New) Expressionist and possibly Cobra traditions[3][4][5] The link between earlier and later works can perhaps be found in large, largely monochromatic paintings such as Trajectory, 2004, or Crossing, 2006.

These are gesturally expressive but more patterned than the earlier works, which tended to contain human- or animal-like elements which were proportionately more dominant.

Rather than diminishing the significance of such routine intercourse, the effect underlines the latent emotional charge of apparently banal exchanges.

"[6] Similarly, critic Mark Ewart wrote with respect to Groener's Heartlands show at the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, "The first thing to hit you about these 28 paintings is, paradoxically, their sparsity.

Ciarán Benson (now Emeritus Professor of Psychology at University College Dublin), when writing about Crossings, concurred with Groener's visual imagery of road and journey to depict the evolution of the self.