Rot x Stahl
Rupprecht Geiger / Alf Lechner
Alf Lechner and Rupprecht Geiger were both in their work, their friendship, and through combined their Bavarian and Munich roots. “The Munich roots of Alf and Rupprecht became particularly clear when both artists met in the studio. yours Friendship and their lively conversations were always an asset for both of them,” reports Camilla Lechner. Both artists were autodidacts. Rupprecht Geiger is one of the most important abstract painters of the German post-war avant-garde, Alf Lechner is the most important Steel sculptor of post-war modernism in Germany.
It has been Alf Lechner's heartfelt wish for many years to present an exhibition with Rupprecht Geiger in the Lechner Museum. In the years before Geiger died in 2009, this wish could no longer be realized. The Lechner Museum is therefore particularly pleased to be working closely with Julia Geiger and the Geiger Archive to make this idea a reality on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Lechner Museum. This first joint museum exhibition by the two artists born in Munich represents an ideal and colorful start to the anniversary year thanks to its supra-regional appeal.
The exhibition contrasts the works of Alf Lechner and Rupprecht Geiger on both floors of the museum. Eleven steel sculptures and three large drawings by Alf Lechner, which deal with the theme of square, sphere, circular arc, enter into dialogue with the shaped canvases and the monochrome geometric image design with circle, line, square and rectangle in Geiger's work.
The exhibition highlights the careers of both artists as leading figures of abstraction and the significance of surfaces and form as a physical experience of color and sculptural space. The “transformation of color matter into color spirit” described by Geiger is directly related to the “complexity of simplicity” in Lechner. The works on display make it clear how both artists worked from different points of view, that of the painter and that of the sculptor, in the same direction of abstraction, expressive and formal language.
The spiritual affinity and harmony in the content of their works, but also the contradiction in the expression of the materials in the art of Rupprecht Geiger (1908 — 2009) and Alf Lechner (1925 — 2017), is particularly evident in the joint project Stehle and Scheibe, which was built in 1987 in front of Munich's Gasteig Cultural Center. The significance of these two “grandmasters of abstraction” is conveyed in this exhibition in a special way through the juxtaposition. Rupprecht Geiger, who, as a painter, shaped his canvases like sculptures and designed spaces out of color (unison red and unison pink) contrasts with the works of Alf Lechner, who gave new structures from the geometric form in steel and the true color of the steel, “rust” as a painterly beautiful and varied changing surface space and central meaning. “My whole goal in life is simplicity,” Alf Lechner liked to say, and continues: “There is so much complicated in simplicity that you can't be simple enough. Real discoveries can only be made in the simplest forms. The more cluttered a shape is, the less you see the essentials.”
