Rupprecht Geiger, Cold Reds on Warm Reds

Rupprecht Geiger, Cold Reds on Warm Reds

”What matters to me is the color. Just the color and its perceptibility” – Rupprecht Geiger

Rupprecht Geiger, son of artist Willi Geiger, was a German architect, painter and sculptor. He was one of the most important exponents of colour field painting whose work employed hard-edge geometric shapes and a riotous colour palette to create his characteristically bold and eye-catching compositions. Geiger’s style was influenced by the Futurist movement of the 1960s, advancements in space research, and abstract art. Along with fellow artists Willi Baumeister and Fritz Winter, Rupprecht Geiger founded the artists group Zen 49 in Munich in 1949. The members of Zen 49 worked toward creating new forms of expression for non-objective art. Although he was trained as an architect, he left architecture to focus entirely on painting in the early 1960s. Geiger was fascinated with colour, particularly red. He once remarked: “red is life, energy, potency, authority, love, warmth, power. Red gets you high.” Rupprecht Geiger achieved worldwide critical acclaim, participating in documenta 2,3,4 and 6, as well as exhibiting at the Museum for non-objective painting (later the Guggenheim) alongside his Professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Major retrospectives have been held by Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Lenbachhaus in Munich (1978 and 2008) and Akademie der Künste in Berlin (1985). German, 1908 – 2009.