"Concrete painting, not abstract, because nothing is more concrete, nothing more real than a line, a color, a surface." Theo van Doesburg
The exhibition, Hommage à la France is dedicated to the various dimensions of the Art concret movement in France as reflected in the collections of the Museum Ritter. The selection of works, which spans almost a century, clearly reveals the lively exchange of ideas within a closely-knit artists' community.
With most of the exhibited works created in the three decades after 1945, the exhibition also presents a variety of pictorial objects whose colors, forms and structures are transformed in a dialogue with the viewer's movements. For instance, how Victor Vasarely, the father Op Art, used simple elements to set the picture surface in apparent vibration or how François Morellet used a random generator to create a picture with a shimmering effect. Such research on the radical reduction of color and form still inspires new methods of design today.
