"The sky is unprecedentedly colorful and incredibly vast. The possibilities are unlimited", Rupprecht Geiger noted in his Russian war diary in 1941 (Rupprecht Geiger, quoted from: Pinc kommt! Rupprecht Geiger, The Schaufler Foundation, Dresden 2017, p. 31). It is the soft color modulations of the sky that appeal to Geiger and which are transformed at night by burning cities into impressive color scenarios that become counter-images to the oppressive reality of war for Geiger. From the 1950s onward, red and blue are the colors that decisively shape the impressive artistic work of the German color field painter Rupprecht Geiger and initially appeared in combination until the end of the 1950s. At the beginning of the 1960s, the two color values were finally clearly separated. While red, as the color of blood and fire, stands for extreme energy and emotional charge, the cooler blue is the more rational, more self-composed color. By using sprayed paint, Geiger gently modulated the red rectangle, which appears to push itself into the format from above, upwards from a rich dark red to a glowing orange and, surrounded by radiant white, has brought it into an almost floating balance. Around 1965, Geiger began to replace his hitherto manual application of paint with that of the spray gun, which henceforth allowed for finer color modulations. The present work is a particularly early example in this new technique. Rupprecht Geiger not only created art-historically significant works with his color modulations, but also with his shaped canvases, which earned him a special progressive position within German post-war art, as Helmut Friedel suggested in the foreword to the catalogue raisonné, demanding stronger comparison with American contemporaries like Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly and Barnett Newman. In the USA, Geiger's paintings were shown in various exhibitions from the 1950s onward and the artist was awarded the Solomon Guggenheim Prize in New York in 1959 . [JS]