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Hsiaosung Kok`s opening address
Curator of the Exhibition "In focus: The 1950s to the 1970s. Works from the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection" |
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in our latest presentation of works from the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection, we have decided to give an overview of the developments in Concrete Art during the three decades beginning in 1950. The principles and ideas regarding abstraction from the pre-war period continued to be of fundamental importance for subsequent generations. With the breakneck pace of the technological and scientific advances that increasingly coloured everyday life, a completely new aspect entered art. The artists consciously addressed the present, making it their programme to create a place for art that had a direct bearing on society.
Our exhibition shows in 70 works from the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection the wide and varied spectrum of artistic production from this period: apart from painting and a selection of works on paper, it feature a number of three-dimensional constructions and luminokinetic and electrically-driven works.
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| Er startet mit den 1980er Jahren, als die Künstlerin sich dauerhaft in Zürich niederlässt und sich auf die "Suche nach Strukturen und Bildsystemen" begibt. In diesen frühen Bildern ist bereits ihre Vorliebe zu erkennen, die elementaren Formen der Geometrie mit ihren visuellen Möglichkeiten zu befragen sowie mit vorgegebenen Ordnungsfeldern zu arbeiten. |
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The way we have hung the exhibits is not only informed by the criteria of style and genre: we wanted above all to highlight the context in which the individual works came into being. Because a key characteristic of precisely the 1950s and 1960s was that artists right across Europe joined ranks in order to elicit a greater response to their goals. In Switzerland for instance the Zurich Concretists grouped together, and a considerable number of artists joined the Movimento d'Arte Concreta in Italy, where Gruppo N and Gruppo T also established the arte programmata. And beyond this, the Nouvelles Tendances movement united like-minded artists throughout Europe in joint exhibitions.
These constellations were able to remove very open and loose in terms of their programmes and membership. Other groups such as those of the arte programmata saw themselves however as artist collectives which, with their joint works and group signature, aimed at undermining the personal authorship of the artwork and with that the dictates of the art market.
It should be noted for all the large number of groups and individual artists in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and France, everyone knew each other very well, right across the borders. The artists maintained international contacts, not least because they discovered a lot of points in common in their approaches and methods. Despite having their own distinct positions, they shared an interest in light, space, motion and rational structural systems. |
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The artists here invoked the spiritual foundations and design principles of early abstraction and developed them further. For instance the French painter and sculptor Jean Gorin transposed the ideas of Neoplasticism to architecture and public space. The Ulm School of Design was created as a "New Bauhaus" by among others Max Bill, who also edited the writings of Wassily Kandinsky in a new edition. Last but not least Josef Albers, who worked and taught at the Bauhaus, then later in the USA and finally at the School of Design in Ulm, was to have a strong influence on the creative output of many of the artists represented in our exhibition. And incidentally, Albers was also a formative influence on Antonio Calderara.
But what exactly were the innovations in Concrete Art after 1950? The wide-sweeping modernisation of people’s lives – from the conquest of space and the new mobility to the increasing electrification of the everyday world – was greeted optimistically by the avant-gardes of the late fifties and sixties. High on the agenda was transcending the divide between the "two cultures", which is to say people sought to reconcile art, technology and the findings of science. The members of the Gruppo N described themselves for instance as engineers who – like researchers in a laboratory – undertook joint experiments. And they were not alone in this approach.
For the representatives of the arte programmata, contemporaneity meant giving expression to the dynamism of the modern world. Thus the artists of the Gruppo N wanted to “concretise” "light, space and time" in their works. The result was kinetic pieces as well as examples of Op Art, which were also the outcome of their searching inquiries into the findings of perceptual psychology.
For many artists the criterion of objectivity was fundamental to their approach. With this they turned categorically against the subjective means of expression championed by l’art informel. Being objective meant liberating the work from the artist’s own signature and proceeding along systematic lines according to exact criteria. From then on, serial structures and planar monochrome forms with subtle surface qualities dominated the aesthetic of the works. |
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| Später setzt sie sich auch mit den weltbekannten Bauten von Ludwig Mies van der Rohe auseinander und interpretiert die "Schönheit und Klarheit der Moderne" mit nüchternen Linien- und Farbkonstellationen. Das vor Ort sinnlich Erlebte schlägt sich in den neueren Bildern von Rita Ernst zugleich in einer deutlich aufgehellten, leuchtenden Farbpalette nieder. Unverkennbar ist dieser atmosphärische, stimmungsvolle Gehalt in den zart schimmernden, lichthaltigen Bildern aus der Tunesien-Serie. |
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Den Ausstellungsrundgang begleiten zahlreiche Beispiele aus dem Arbeitsfundus von Rita Ernst sowie ein Film über das Leben und Wirken der Künstlerin.
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Abbildungen von links oben nach rechts unten:
Blick in den Ausstellungsraum "Rom: Wenn Waagrecht und Senkrecht sich verbinden…"
Rita Ernst, Zwischenräume, 1985
Blick in den Ausstellungsraum "Sizilien: Aus historischer Architektur wird Malerei"
Rita Ernst, Piazza Armerina Duomo, 2000
Rita Ernst, Vanishing Point II, 2005
Blick in den Ausstellungsraum "Mies van der Rohe: Schönheit und Klarheit der Moderne"
Rita Ernst, Progetto Tunisino, 2008 (VII)
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