Whenever Rudi Tröger is painting and drawing, secluded in his studio in a small town near Dachau, he thinks less about the result of his work. He is not concerned about making a definite statement or giving clear answers. “The creative process is fundamentally more important to me than the result.

By making the slightest change, a relatively ‘finished’ picture can be started over again; it has to be goaded along until it can move on its own. A picture is almost never an end, but an effect, it should always awaken a desire to be reopened.” There is always much more hidden behind his landscapes, still lifes and portraits than just the obvious, but they are more like an accumulation of key words, from which a variety of stories can be spun. Rudi Tröger was born in 1929 in Marktleuthen in Upper Franconia.

There he got his first introduction to art through the painter Wilhelm Beindorf and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich between 1949 and 1957. Impressionism and the works by Cézannes had a great influence upon his work. Art Informel, which developed from the mid-1950s, had no effect on Rudi Tröger’s art – he continued undeterred on his chosen path. In 1967, the artist received a call to the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich where he taught for 25 years parallel to his job as a freelance painter. Only in 1977, once Tröger was appointed a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, did the first exhibition of his works take place. Hermann Kern, later the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, organised the show at the Kunstraum München.

After this significant exhibition, his works from the late 1980s could be seen in, among others, the Morsbroich Museum in Leverkusen (1987), the Villa Stuck in Munich (1988), the State Academy and Museum of Applied Arts in St. Petersburg (1995) as well as the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München (1999). Rudi Tröger received, inter alia, the Art Prize of the City of Munich and the Culture Prize of Bavaria (2013).