Rupprecht Geiger

(German, 1908–2009)

Rupprecht Geiger was a German Color Field painter whose work employed hard-edge geometric abstractions and a riotous palette of pinks, reds, and yellows. Painted in vibrant fluorescent hues, Gieger's paintings feature repeated forms and compositions across his many canvases, culminating in an ambitious body of work that seemed perhaps more aligned with the color studies of Josef Albers than his peers Willi Baumeister, Fritz Winter, and Bernard Schultze in the German movement ZEN 49, which he co-founded. Throughout the 1950s he was particularly taken with the color red, once remarking that “red is life, energy, potency, authority, love, warmth, power. Red gets you high.” Born on January 26, 1908 in Munich, Germany, Geiger's passion for painting was facilitated by his father, the prominent artist Willi Geiger. He achieved worldwide critical acclaim, marked by such honors as exhibiting at the Museum for Non-Objective Painting, which would later become the Guggenheim Foundation, his participation at documenta 2, 3, 4, and 6, and his professorship at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1965 to 1976. Geiger died on December 6, 2009.