About the Work
A cosmic, unearthly space. We are standing in the midst of a stream of coloured light, intoxicated by the beauty of the colours, and by the fine modulations and interjections. A luminous steep face blocks our view as it hastens towards the horizon, while the glowing red asserts itself against a round black shadow. Even here, in his early work, Rupprecht Geiger's painting confronts us with concentrated, colourful energy. Whether in a harmonious progression or a tense encounter, it reveals qualities that by no means lack ambiguity. To achieve the pure colour experience, Geiger dispenses with a personal signature and a commitment to the object. A pioneer of abstract painting in Germany, Geiger founded the ZEN 49 group after the war and developed a form of abstraction which liberates itself from the object. 'E 222' dates from 1956 and is an outstanding example of his early non-representational paintings, which nonetheless retain a wealth of associations while also providing a foretaste of the unique sensuousness of his colour field paintings of the 1960s and 1970s.
