Paint
Paintings from the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection
13 October 2024 to 21 April 2025
Exhibition opening: Saturday, 12 October, 5 p.m.
More than any other genre, painting is generally regarded as the epitome of fine art. In a world dominated by an ever-growing flood of digital images, it still remains the most popular means of artistic expression. To this day, most painting is done in the classic tradition of the panel painting, in which the colour is applied to a flat, rectangular and transportable image carrier.
With the exhibition Paint, Museum Ritter casts a look at more recent developments in non-representational painting and presents over 50 works from the collection, most of them created after 2000. The selection brings together a spectrum of highly individual approaches that simultaneously underlines how kindred strategies and procedures are employed when working in the medium of paint. In addition to paintings that follow an exactly determined, mathematical and logical blueprint, the exhibition features a number of works executed with loose brushstrokes on the canvas in order to conjure up vibrating colour spaces. Such paintings are accompanied at times by the renunciation of a broad palette of hues, and the artists may even limit themselves to just one colour, which they elaborate in nuanced ways. The viewer’s gaze can then immerse or indeed lose itself in the picture.
A final field of aesthetic exploration is directed to three-dimensional space, which has produced many striking interpretations. Here finely modulated plays of light and shade, subtle colour gradients or transparent glazes create the illusion of plasticity and spatial depth. Yet other works showcase the picture carrier in its physicality, or the sensual qualities of the paint itself. The Shaped Canvases, on the other hand, deviate from the standard type of panel painting inasmuch as they emphasise the work’s object character and bring the exhibition wall “into the picture”.
With works by among others:
Susanne Ackermann, Enrico Bach, Katrina Blannin, Ruo Bing Chen, Isa Dahl, Philippe Decrauzat, Paul Uwe Dreyer, Rita Ernst, Raimund Girke, Kuno Gonschior, Gotthard Graubner, Joachim Grommek, Frieder Kühner, Matti Kujasalo, Vera Leutloff, Lienhard von Monkiewitsch, Sarah Morris, Dirk Rathke, Esther Stocker, Herbert Volz