Houses and Paintings
Rupprecht Geiger as Architect and Painter
11 October 2026 to 4 April 2027
Rupprecht Geiger is one of the most significant German artists of the post-1945 era. His pictorial oeuvre is characterised by a palette that is at once sensitive and intoxicating, allied to an uncompromising artistic programme. The origin of Geiger's art lies in the energy of light and colour. For him, colour was both a refuge from the horrors of war, which he experienced as a young soldier on the Eastern Front, and a departure into a new visual language after Fascism. Less well known is the significance of architecture for the artist, who was himself a trained and practising architect. Long before the war, in the 1920s, Geiger studied architecture in Munich, complemented by practical training as a bricklayer and further study in building technology and structural engineering. Until his conscription for military service, he worked at various architectural practices, among them that of the renowned Oswald Eduard Bieber, whose daughter Monika Bieber — herself later an architect — he came to know, entering with her into a lifelong partnership and marriage.
He returned from the war as a painter to a devastated Munich. It was here that he experienced an intensely colourful moment of awakening which, by his own account, set him on the path towards pure colour effect as a renewing force in the wake of total destruction. Yet as an architect, too, he played a part in society's reconstruction and in shaping a vision of modernity after Fascism. Quietly modern, almost restrained, and entirely without the radical departure that marks his pictorial work, Geiger designed and built houses, among them at Lake Starnberg and in the immediate surrounding area.
The exhibition presents five buildings by way of example. They were created between 1950 and 1962, before Geiger abandoned architecture to devote himself entirely to the fine arts. Each house is presented through photographs, documents and, where available, original architectural plans. These are accompanied in each case by paintings created during the planning and construction period of the houses, or, in one instance, offering a glimpse ahead into later developments. The result is an unprecedented parallel presentation of two art forms by the same artist — forms that, moreover, developed in entirely different directions.
The exhibition was created in collaboration between the Museum Starnberger See and the Archiv Geiger, directed by Julia Geiger, the artist's granddaughter. It was made possible through the generous financial support of the Friends Association Freundeskreis Museum Starnberger See, the Curt Wills Foundation, and Dr. Isabella Grahsl und Dr. Christian B. Fulda.