Rupprecht Geiger, born in 1908, a freelance architect and founding member of the group ZEN 49, from his 57sten on a professor at the State Art Academy in Düsseldorf, interrupted appearances at the Documenta in the sixties and seventies and some honorary memberships, the representation in Germany at the XXV. Biennale in Sao Paulo 2002, is a solid rather than a sensational artist. Geigers works are represented in many collections, and especially the late phase of the work can in no way be ignored. The abstract color fields are oversized and monumental, colors rush before luminosity, almost always the color red is used with pink or orange as non-complementary, but limiting, contrasting companion.

The exhibition in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, opened on 15th december 07 and running until the 30.03.2008 will be seen on several floors and constitutes an overview, which shows how in the undisturbed and protected lack of sensationality Geiger's work developes with an aesthetic frightening systematics a continuing challenge to comparatively late perfection.

From the constructivist looking beginnings of Geiger's arise quasi serial color combinations, or color and spatial effects in free architectural designs, through playful experiments with red in objet trouvés collages and bigger sized Op Art images, before he developed finally monumental color fields, usually dyadic in red and a companion color, and likewise sculptural or architectural forms.

The impressive aspect in this story, which through the completion of the „Work list of Paintings 1942-2002“ (65, - €) with the „List of works, including prints of the posters“ (75, - €) and an additional volume with texts about Rupprecht Geiger and a fragment of the Seriegrafie "Red on yellow" (2007) (22, - €) are now given in a complete scientifically overview, is the late start of what Geiger is in the collections.

The images in unusual formats and different geometries in red were done in the eighties and in the nineties, four large formats from the year 2001 were created for the Sao Paulo Biennale. At that time the artist is already about 80 years old. The overall work is, as far as such a judgment is possible, is what the work from earlier periods pointed to, with all their proximity to other artists and domination by other styles (such as Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein and Bridget Riley). Irrelevant of these influences and contexts the late works complete something individual as a kind of solution for a problem the earlier works asked about.

Four of these works, bicolored and bistructured from different geometries and combined with lighter emphasis on the color application – are presented in the exhibition and offer this solution scheme, two of them as a quasi-floor installation in the building's inner architecture, including „Neues Rot für Gorbatschow“ of 1989 and a variante of „Pink contra Orange“.

Dieter Honisch, who estimates Geiger in a special way reflects in his description of the work written in 1988 this attempt to a concept fitting art "The Oval, or the disc in the rectangle are to become the real compromise formula in which the 'exponent', as he himself once put it, is connected with the exhibit, color and image such that none of it has to abandon its independence."

But although Honisch also states: "The work of Geiger has strangely - like that of Rothko - no development. His art is from the beginning there. Geiger developed this scheme in a rectangular oval just one step further to circles or ovals next to rectangular forms, who gives up the distinction between image and image carriers to completely abandon the " Picture sculpture" already indicated by Honisch (Honisch 1988, p. 32).

Another of the great writers about Geiger's work was Max Imdahl, who is well known as a theorist of the picture concept in art history. About Geiger's image 703/75 he wrote 1988 - by dragging it to a „Knowable of the form" and the „Only visible of color": „Colors attack the severity of the geometric shape and the certainty of this." (36).

The theoretical abstractions and deferrals, that accompanied Geiger's development since the late forties show in the context of the actual development the work not as redrawing but directing. Geiger's works of the late eighties and nineties are not just small (or large) perfections of decorative, abstract painting, but, as in decades of theoretical reflection and visual development, including evidence of the beautiful nature of conceptual art.

Report and Photos: Dr. Ulrike Ritter

Rupprecht Geiger.

Retrospective 12/15/07 – 03/30/08

Munich Lenbachhaus

Luisenstraße 33

80333 Munich

Tel 0049 89 233320 00

Opening Hours:

Tue-Sun and holidays 10-18 pm