"The exhibition Hommage à la France is dedicated to the various approaches to concrete art in France as reflected in the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection. While the main thrust of the show is directed to paintings, they are flanked by picture-objects, lumino-kinetic works and installations. This selection of works, which spans almost an entire century, clearly demonstrates through many examples the lively exchange of ideas within the artists' community. The greater part of the exhibits were created in the three decades after 1945, which in many ways reflects the enormous cultural upswing during that era.
In addition to a large number of brightly coloured paintings from Auguste Herbin to Leo Breuer, the exhibition presents a variety of pictorial objects whose colours, forms and structures are transformed in a dialogue with the viewer's movements. At the same time, in Victor Vasarely’s works one can experience how the father of Op Art used simple elements to set the picture surface in apparent vibration. The works of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV) are also characterised by systematic thinking married with the spirit of research. François Morellet, for instance, used a random generator to create a picture with a shimmering effect. Finally, another section of the exhibition illustrates how the radical reduction of colour and form à la De Stijl and Bauhaus still inspires new avenues of design today." - Museum Ritter
