“805/89”

Details

Geiger 788. Exhibitions: Rupprecht Geiger, Rot-Form-Bilder, Kunstverein Braunschweig 1989. Provenance: Private ownership, Germany.

Description

• Wall sculpture radiating in intense red tones, featuring the reduced formal vocabulary typical of Rupprecht Geiger’s work
• Gentle modulations within the fields of colour create an extraordinary effect
• Rupprecht Geiger’s colour modulations have secured him a place in art history “Red is beautiful. Red is life, energy, potency, power, love, warmth, strength. Red gets you high” Rupprecht Geiger, 1975/78 Throughout his life, colour – especially the luminosity and energy of colour – was the main theme in Rupprecht Geiger’s work. Colour is heightened to a visual experience in works which seem to vibrate when you look at them. By limiting his formal vocabulary to elementary forms without visual references or perspective, he was able to give colour his full attention. As a trained architect, Geiger experimented with irregular formats as early as 1948, even before American artists such as Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly began creating “shaped canvases” in the early 1960s. He wanted to avoid associations with landscapes and increase abstraction. After initially spraying paint onto the supports during his time in Düsseldorf (1965-76), Geiger returned to the technique of dabbing on colour with a brush and the use of a paint roller in the 1980s. As in this work from 1989, the flawless, powder-coated surfaces of his paintings become restless, earthy structures that bulge in places. In his compositions of the 1980s, Geiger focussed on simple groupings of rectangular shapes in his characteristic shades of red.