Museum Ritter will shortly be witnessing a “Change of Pictures”. After the inaugural exhibition SQUARE, a new selection will now be shown from the holdings of the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection.

For this “Change of Pictures“ the collector and founder of the Museum has put together a representative selection of around 70 artworks. These works act as an exemplary history of concrete constructive art from the 1920s to the present day. The chronological point of departure for the new presentation is a small piece by Erich Buchholz: around 1920 the artist came up with a highly expressive geometrical style which he referred to as “absolute abstraction, with a whiff of Expressionism”. Just how diverse the geometrical tendencies in art came to be in the years between the wars can be seen from early paintings and works on paper by artists such as Rudolf Jahns, Kurt Schwitters, Anastasius Soldati, Johannes Itten and Adolf Fleischmann.

The line traced in this exhibition extends further to embrace post-war developments. Here the rigorous mathematical approaches employed by contemporary representatives of concrete constructive art, including Shizuko Yoshikawa, Rita Ernst and Jacob Bill, contrast with an extremely painterly use of colour and form: Both the velvety radiance for instance of Gotthard Graubner’s “colour space bodies” and the intensive coloration in the paintings of Josef Albers, Horst Antes and Heinz Mack show the sensual results that can be achieved when artists tackle the theme of the square.

An important focus of the exhibition is on works produced during the last 15 years. Numerous works by contemporary artists such as Madeleine Dietz, Sinisa Kandic, Lienhard von Monkiewitsch, Werner Pokorny, Gerhard Richter and Jochen Twelker demonstrate how even today the exploration of the square can open up surprisingly unconventional, associative and playful possibilities.