Image: Museum Ritter (Waldenbuch), Bonn
Museum Ritter in Waldenbuch, Germany, will present ‘Marguerite Hersberger. Zwischenräume’ from 17 May to 27 September 2026, bringing together around 50 wall objects and several sculptures by the Basel-born, Zurich-based artist. The exhibition will survey Hersberger’s free artistic practice from the late 1960s to the present, with a monumental wall installation planned for the museum foyer. The opening is scheduled for 16 May at 5pm.
The exhibition is presented at Museum Ritter, the art institution of the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Foundation for the Promotion of Art. Based in a building designed by Swiss architect Max Dudler, the museum focuses on geometric-abstract art and regularly stages changing exhibitions alongside presentations connected to the Marli Hoppe-Ritter Collection. Museum Ritter is located at Alfred-Ritter-Straße 27 in Waldenbuch and is open Tuesday to Sunday from 11am to 6pm; it is closed on Mondays.
Hersberger’s work combines a precise geometric vocabulary and clean construction associated with Concrete art and Minimalism with vivid arrangements of colour and form. The museum describes her practice as consistently concerned with space and with acrylic glass, using transparency, light, colour and shadow as formative elements. Although her bodies of work are clearly distinguished from one another, they share an interest in making spatial relationships perceptible within and around the object.
A central material in Hersberger’s practice is transparent acrylic glass. After experimenting with small, angular acrylic prisms that refracted incoming light, she began, from the early 1970s, to use the material primarily as discs in wall boxes and picture objects with visible fronts. In her ‘Polissagen’, a specially developed grinding technique roughens the acrylic surface and partially obscures the view into the work. Her ‘Lichtpinsel’ employ light-conducting glass fibres, while the ‘Pliagen’ investigate folding. In more recent series, she works with coloured shadows.
The resulting works bring front and rear image planes into visual contact, allowing colour forms to merge into new configurations. The space between the layers produces structures that can appear to vibrate and change according to the light, the viewer’s position and the angle of observation. In this way, the exhibition presents Hersberger’s objects as works that move between two and three dimensions rather than remaining fixed within a single category.
Marguerite Hersberger was born in Basel in 1943 and studied sculpture at the Basel School of Arts and Crafts from 1964 to 1966. She lived in Paris from 1967 to 1970 and worked in the studio of sculptor François Stahly before moving to Zurich in 1970. She held an assistantship with Camille Graeser in 1972 and has lived and worked in Zurich. Between 1980 and 2021, she realised around 50 art-in-architecture projects in Switzerland and abroad. ‘Marguerite Hersberger. Zwischenräume’ remains on view at Museum Ritter through 27 September 2026.
