Rudi Tröger

Rudi Tröger is a German painter and university professor who was born in Marktleuthen. From 1967 to 1992 he was a professor for painting art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

In his early years, Tröger received since 1946 private painting and drawing lessons by the German painter Wilhelm Beindorf in his home village Marktleuthen. Due to these early student years, he had the privilege of a first and basic artistic education. Tröger: "For myself this time was a gift, it was inspiring and important."
 

"Landscape, portrait, and still life are the subjects that Rudi Tröger is working on since the early 1960s. Classical themes that still determine his work today," art historian Michael Semff sums up Tröger's oeuvre. On plus the artist is also well known for his studies of bathers. The transitions between the individual genres are fluid. Still lifes in his works are partly depicted in front of landscapes, garden paintings show an open transition to wide landscapes. His painting style is described as both representational and expressive, both realistic and abstract. In this respect, it is difficult to assign Tröger to a particular art movement. The art historian Bärbel Schäfer describes Tröger as a border crosser between the worlds: His art conjures up poetry and melancholy, depicts beauty and broken illusions, expresses harmony, loneliness and the lost of man, his exposure to the world.[9]

Pictorial themes such as still lifes, landscapes and bathing figures by the French painter Paul Cézanne influenced his artistic work, as did the works of Adolf Hölzel and Oskar Coester. Although Tröger perceived the Informalism that unfolded in the 1950s, he continued on his own path as an artist. Between 1965 and 1968, Tröger produced also a notable printmaking work alongside his paintings.

Tröger favours the withdrawn work as an artist and intensive examination of the painting process but shuns the great stage of the art world. Thus, for him, the process of creating is fundamentally more important than the result. His creative process is characterized by repeated revisions and interruptions. Tröger is not only interested in figuration in itself, but in the metamorphosis of visual experience into a pictorial idea.

In the year 1949 Tröger moved to Munich and studied until 1957 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. His professors were Hans Gött and Erich Glette. Since these years he is also active as an independent artist. In 1967 he was appointed as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He taught for 25 years until 1992. His students were, amongst others, Peter Casagrande, Wolfgang Eberlein, Cornelia Eichacker, Paul Havermann, Martin Gensbaur, Christoph Kern, Gerhard Merz, German Stegmaier, Horst Thürheimer und Richard Vogl. In the year 1977 Tröger was elected a regular member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich.

Relatively late he presented his own artworks to the public: in 1977 the first exhibition of his paintings and drawings out of the years from 1963 to 1976 took place. Hermann Kern, later director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, organized the show at the Kunstraum München. Since the 1980s Tröger is represented by the Gallery Fred Jahn in Munich. In the 1990s and 2000s, numerous nationwide and international exhibitions followed, including in Munich, Berlin, Zürich, Saint Petersburg, and New York. Since 2006, ten of the artist's large garden paintings adorn the Hubertussaal in the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich.

Tröger lives and works since the 1970s in the area of Dachau, in the north-west of Munich.