WALDENBUCH.- Over the past decades, Marguerite Hersberger has developed a body of constructive works that convey a highly atmospheric sensuality. By combining a precise geometric vocabulary with clearly thought-out design, as is typical of Concrete Art or Minimalism, she conjures up vibrant constellations of shapes and colours. Although the various series that artist has developed are quite distinct from one another, she demonstrates an enormous consistency in her engagement with the theme of space and her preference for working with acrylic glass. Her oeuvre is also consistent inasmuch as it is based throughout on the same principles: limiting herself to elementary forms and structures, and playing with transparency, colour, light and shadow to create space.

After a phase of experimenting with small acrylic prisms that refract incident light, Hersberger soon began to employ transparent plastic glass, chiefly in the form of panes. Since the early 1970s, she has used it to create wall boxes and image objects with a see-through front. In every case she varies a specific theme according to her own rules. While she roughens the acrylic glass front of her Polissages by means of a specially designed grinding technique, so as to cast a veil of mystery over the interior of a work, in her Lichtpinsel (Light Brushes) she uses light-conducting glass fibres. In her Pliages, by contrast, Hersberger explores the principle of folding, and in her latest series of works she even ‘paints’ with coloured shadows. By blending the front and back planes of the image, the colour forms in these and other series merge to form new configurations.

The interspace between the two levels allows vibrant structures to arise that change dynamically according to the incidence of light and the viewer’s perspective; at the same time these works blur the boundaries between two- and three-dimensionality.

With around 50 wall objects and several sculptures, the exhibition offers a broad insight into Marguerite Hersberger’s independent work from the late 1960s to the present.

A particular highlight of the exhibition is a monumental wall installation with which the artist impressively adorns the museum foyer.