Rupprecht Geiger (1908–2009) was born in Munich, the only child of Willi Geiger, a painter later branded "degenerate" by the Nazi regime and dismissed from his teaching post. Rupprecht trained as an architect, graduating in 1935, before being drafted to the Eastern Front in 1940; from 1942 he served as a war illustrator in Ukraine and Greece, a position his father helped secure. He taught himself to paint throughout, largely in secret.

Geiger exhibited his first abstract painting in 1948, and the following year co-founded ZEN 49 in Munich with Willi Baumeister, Fritz Winter, and sculptors Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff — dedicated to establishing abstract art in a country that had, within living memory, prosecuted it as degenerate. His fascination with radiant red traces to a specific encounter: a lipstick from a postwar American CARE package, whose bodiless, luminous intensity he spent his career trying to reproduce on canvas. "Red is life, energy, virility, power, love, warmth, strength," he later said of the colour that defined his practice.

Geiger worked as an architect until 1962, designing Munich's main railway station facade in 1951 and later a Reichstag mural — a parallel career shaping the hard-edged precision of his painting. From 1948 he was already experimenting with irregular, non-rectangular canvases, predating similar work by Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly by roughly a decade. Hilla von Rebay, founding director of the future Guggenheim, personally selected his work for exhibition in New York. From 1965 to 1976 he held a professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, shaping a generation of German painters while developing the luminous, spray-applied colour fields that became his signature.

E 180 (1952), Rupprecht Geiger's earliest landmark work, was the first painting he made using daylight-luminous pigments — the technical breakthrough that made his lifelong pursuit of bodiless, radiant colour physically possible on canvas for the first time.

Colour in the Round (1969), a portfolio of nine screenprint variants published by Galerie Der Spiegel, Cologne, applies his signature colour investigations to a single recurring circular form — the same hue relationships tested repeatedly across warm and cool combinations, isolating colour interaction as the work's entire subject.

Pinc kommt (1995), a monumental painting over six metres wide, demonstrates Geiger's late-career command of immersive colour space at genuinely architectural scale — ambition enough to lend its title to a dedicated museum retrospective decades later.

377/62 (1962), Geiger's auction record at €200,000 (Ketterer Kunst, Munich, 2022), sold for nearly three times its high estimate — a hard-edged colour field from the height of his mature Munich period.

Geiger's prints are no secondary echo of his paintings — in some respects, screenprint suits his investigation better than paint ever could. Silkscreen ink sits flat and saturated on the surface in a way oil struggles to match, delivering exactly the bodiless luminosity Geiger chased since first encountering it in a wartime lipstick. Paint yellows and dulls with decades of light exposure; flat-applied screenprint pigment tends to hold that intensity far more faithfully. Colour in the Round (1969) and Metapher Zahl (1985–89), his nine- and ten-part portfolios, prove the point directly — the same colour relationships tested in oil, rendered in a medium arguably built for exactly this purpose.

His portfolio auction record stands at €32,500, for the complete Metapher Zahl set at Karl & Faber, Munich, in 2022. Individual signed prints trade separately at gallery prices in the low to mid thousands — direct access to a founding figure of German postwar abstraction, in a medium that may preserve his central obsession more faithfully than canvas itself.

For collectors, Geiger's limited edition prints offer entry into a practice treating colour not as decoration but as an autonomous, almost spiritual force. Works are held in the permanent collections of the Pinakothek der Moderne, the Guggenheim, and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.