Marguerite Hersberger’s material of choice is acrylic glass. Transparent or milky, colourless or tinted, it has become the characteristic feature of her work. At first the artist worked solely with prisms or rectangular geometrical forms, but since 1990 she has augmented them by circular shapes. In her work Ruhender Kreis [Resting Circle] two acrylic discs have been placed one on top of the other at a distance of approximately 2 cm; in this way Marguerite Hersberger extends the picture surface into the spatial dimension. As a result her works are to be seen as hovering between pictures and sculptures, and she herself refers to them as “relief pictures”.

On the hindmost disc is a square frame made up of two blue rectangles, two black squares and two grey ones. Set around this is a circular white surface. The colour is applied to the acrylic glass in transparent glazes, with the number of coats determining the density of the colour and with that the intensity. The front sheet of acrylic glass is polished and matt, with just a square frame left free that allows a transparent, unhindered view of the coloured surfaces behind. The matt effect on the front sheet blurs the sharp contour of the circular surface, while an additional, diffuse kind of blurring occurs when the work is viewed not fronton but from the side. On changing position, the matt disc shifts over the coloured surfaces so as once again to break up the outline. The “airspace”, as Marguerite Hersberger describes the interval between the two sheets, is decisive here. It introduces something unpredictable to the calculable geometrical effects.

The artist has been fascinated by this kind of juggling ever since she stayed in Paris between 1967 and 1970. There she met up with the “Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel” (GRAV), whose founder member François Morellet had a particular influence on her. It was from him she discovered the use of mathematical laws, which are simultaneously undermined by chance and irony. Marguerite Hersberger works with mathematical precision. But what is essential for her is not the formal context but rather the mysterious interferences between forms and their effects. Her work can be taken as a metaphor of the world: as a metaphor for the eternal discrepancy between being and appearances, and for the fact that ultimately it is always our own personal vantage point that determines how we perceive things.

Marguerite Hersberger

1943 born in Basel

Lives and works in Zurich