Red x steel
Rupprecht Geiger / Alf Lechner
Alf Lechner and Rupprecht Geiger were connected both in their work, their friendship, and through their Bavarian and Munich roots. "The Munich roots of Alf and Rupprecht were especially evident when both artists met in the studio. Their friendship and their lively conversations were always an enrichment for both of them" reports Camilla Lechner. Both artists were self-taught. Rupprecht Geiger is one of the most important abstract painters of the German post-war avant-garde, while Alf Lechner is the most important steel sculptor of post-war modernism in Germany.
For many years, Alf Lechner's heart's desire was to present an exhibition with Rupprecht Geiger in the Lechner Museum. In the years before Geiger's death in 2009, this wish could no longer be realized. Therefore, it is a special pleasure for the Lechner Museum, in close cooperation 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 of the two Munich-born artists represents an ideal and colorful prelude to the anniversary year due to its supra-regional appeal.
The exhibition juxtaposes 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 a dialogue with the shaped canvases and the monochrome geometric image design with circle, line, square and rectangle in the work of Geiger.
The exhibition elaborates the career of both artists as leading figures of abstraction and the significance of surfaces and form as a physical experience of color as well as sculptural space. The "transformation of color matter to color spirit" described by Geiger is thereby directly related to the "complexity of simplicity" in Lechner's work. It becomes clear from the exhibited works how both artists worked from different standpoints, that of the painter and that of the sculptor, in the same direction of abstraction, expression and form.
The spiritual affinity and harmony in the content of their works but also the contrast 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 und Scheibe, which was erected in front of the Munich Cultural Center Gasteig in 1987. The significance of these two "grand masters of abstraction" is conveyed in this exhibition in a special way through juxtaposition. Rupprecht Geiger, who as a painter shaped his canvases like sculptures and created spaces out of color (Unisono Red and Unisono Pink) is juxtaposed with the works of Alf Lechner, who created new structures out of the geometric form in steel and gave new space and a central meaning to the true color of steel, the "rust" as surfaces that are beautiful in painting and change in many ways. "My whole goal in life is simplicity" Alf Lechner liked to say, and further: "There is so much complexity in simplicity that one cannot be simple enough. Real discoveries are only made in the simplest forms. The more cluttered a form is, the less one sees the essential."
