496/68. 1968.
Acrylic on canvas.
Dornacher/Geiger 471. 150,3 x 150,3 cm (59,1 x 59,1 in).
One of the artist's rare composition in green. This painting was awarded the Burda Art Prize in 1968.

PROVENANCE: Private collection Southrn Germany.

EXHIBITION: Große Kunstausstellung München, Haus der Kunst, 13 June - 29 September, 1968, cat. no. 200 (with exhibition label on stretcher as well as with an exhibition card signed by the artist.

Rupprecht Geiger was born in Munich in 1908 as the only child of the painter and graphic artist Willi Geiger. He spent his childhood and his youth in Munich and in the foot-hills of the Bavarian Alps. In 1924 his family moved to Spain for one year where Geiger attended the "Colegio aleman" in Madrid and accompanied his father on his trips to the Canary Islands and to Morocco. Geiger made his first drawings and water-colors during this period. One year after returning from Spain, in 1926, Geiger attended Eduard Pfeiffer's architectural class at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich. He graduated as an architect in 1935 and spent half a year in Rome together with his father. Geiger then worked in a Munich architect's bureau until 1940 when he was sent to the Russian Front. Typical of this period are his dark-colored landscapes in watercolor. Geiger returned to Germany for a short period in 1942 before his father helped him to get a job as a war painter in the Ukraine. Geiger returned to Munich after the end of the war. His first abstract work was exhibited in 1948 at the "Salon des Réalités Nouvelles" in Paris. One year later Geiger joined up with Baumeister, Matschinsky-Denninghoff and Winter and founded the group "ZEN 49". Geiger discovered his true style during the 1950s. He gave up working as an architect in 1962 in order to concentrate on his painting. In 1965 Geiger was appointed professor at the Akademie in Düsseldorf, a post that he held until 1976.

Rupprecht Geiger belongs among the most important representatives of German color field painting. Geiger attained abstraction in the late 1940s. While his compositions of the 1950s and early 1960s are still characterized by differentiated shades of blue and red and dominated by circles and rectangles, the reduction and concentration of color and form reached its peak in the late 1960s. From that point on the circle as a symbol of concentration is in the focus of Geiger‘s creation, which by means of an increased usage of lucent colors shows no more references to nature and the representational world. It is taken to a meditative color space. As it is particularly characteristic of this early work period, in this painting a compressed circle is formed in a rich green, modulated in a barely perceivable color gradient and filled with soft motion. The green form, which seems to be agravically hovering on the image’s surface, becomes both a meditative symbol of calmness, as well as a source of power, all in line with Geiger’s concept of art, with the purpose of filling the beholder with positive energy.

Geiger was a member of the ’Akademie der Schönen Künste’ in Munich since 1982. In 1987 he was commissioned with the sculpture ‘Gerundetes Blau’ for the cultural centre Gasteig in Munich. The artist died in Munich in 2009. [KP].