architect painter professor sculptor
Rupprecht Geiger was born as the only child of painter and printmaker Willi Geiger in Munich in 1908. Geiger spent his childhood in Munich and the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. In 1924 his family went to Spain for a year. He also joined his father on trips to Morocco and the Canary Islands.
In Spain Geiger attended the Colegio Aleman in Madrid. From 1926 through 1935 he studied architecture and art at academic institutions in Munich. The artist entered the architectural class of Eduard Pfeiffer at the Munich Kunstgewerbeschule, from which he graduated as an architect in 1935. As a painter, Geiger was self-taught.
Rupprecht Geiger spent half a year in 1936 in Rome together with his father. Until he was drafted to serve in the military and sent to the Russian front in 1940, Geiger worked at an architect's bureau in Munich. During that time he painted landscape watercolors in dark shades.
In 1942 Rupprecht Geiger returned to Germany for a short time. Subsequently, his father helped him to get a job as a war painter in Ukraine. After the war, the artist returned to Munich. In 1948 his first abstract picture was exhibited at the Salon des Réalistes Nouvelles in Paris. One year later Geiger founded the ZEN 49 group of artists together with Baumeister, Matschinsky-Denninghoff, and Winter.
In the 1950s Geiger found his typical style. He incorporated the futurist style of the sixties influenced by space research in his abstract and colorful compositions. In 1959 and 1977 the artist participated in Document. In 1962 he stopped working as an architect to focus entirely on painting. In 1965 Rupprecht Geiger was appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he subsequently worked until 1976.
In 1982 the artist worked as a member of the Munich Akademie der Schönen Künste. In 1987 he received an important commission to produce the sculpture "Gerundetes Blau" for the Munich cultural center "Gasteig." His abstract color compositions made Rupprecht Geiger one of the most important exponents of color field painting in Germany. Geiger died on December 6, 2009 in Munich.
In 1989 Geiger earned the Kultureller Ehrenpreis der Landeshauptstadt München. In 1992 he was awarded The Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, in 1995 the Oberbayerischer Kulturpreis, and in 1997 the Goldene Ehrenmünze der Landeshauptstadt München. Rupprecht Geiger was best known for his color field paintings and for his passion for the color red.
The color red for him in his own words was "power and warmth, power and energy, life and love."
Quotations:
"Red is life, energy, potency, power, love, warmth, strength. With her ability to stimulate she is in powerful function."
"I was always interested in austere, simple forms and shapes. The motifs in my sketchbooks were always cubistic windowless buildings, white ones in front of deep blue skies or the sea… He (Eduard Pfeiffer) taught us that simple things, not cluttered things, were needed to attain the greatest effect….I realize that even now after having left architecture for art, I still adhere to this rule. I think this explains the formal severity of my works today."
Rupprecht was a founding member of the artist group "Zen 49." In 1970 he became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, in 1979 was an honorary member of the Academy Dusseldorf and in 1983 a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Rupprecht Geiger was married to Monika Bieber. They married in 1937 and had two sons, Lenz in 1938 and Florian in 1940.
