»Homage to the Square« - This title, from a famous work series by Josef Albers, could accurately describe the Sammlung Marli Hoppe-Ritter. The breadth of painterly and sculptural confrontation with the square, its continuing dynamism as a form and the exciting lines that can be drawn across through 20th and 21st-century art show how compelling the Collection’s concept is.
The Sammlung Marli Hoppe-Ritter consists of nearly 1200 paintings, objects, sculptures and graphic works. It unites many artistic concepts that have the square as a point of departure or goal. It therefore contains an entire century of art history in a concentrated form. Beginning with Malevich, the square has finally become a paradigm of the moderns from constructivism to De Stijl, the Zurich Concrete Artists to Minimal Art. Countless artists have confronted the square as a form and as content, especially in Abstract and Concrete Art.
Choosing a small history of the square as a collection concept has proven to be exciting, surprising and of special artistic interest. It is by no means boring, but rather an endless, generous stream of artworks that have to do with the serious, playful, mathematic, spiritual, analytical and humorous aspects of the “four corners with right angles.”