The German painter Johannes Geccelli was born in Königsberg (today Kaliningrad) on October 14, 1925 . After the end of the Second World War, Johannes Geccelli studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf from 1947 to 1951. Among his teachers was Paul Bindel, who also had later luminaries like Raimund Girke, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Hans Salentin in his class. At the end of the 1950s, Johannes Geccelli was part of the circle of artists around the “ZERO” group and showed his works in the fifth evening exhibition in Otto Piene’s Düsseldorf studio in 1957.
From the 1960s, Johannes Geccelli became a recognized representative of Color Field Painting, alongside artists such as Rupprecht Geiger and Gotthard Graubner, as well as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Johannes Geccelli was friends with international artists like George Rickey and Bridget Riley and he was in close contact with many big names of the international art world. In 1977, Dieter Honisch, then director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, State Museums in Berlin, acquired one of his works for the museum's collection. In 1982, Johannes Geccelli took part in the exhibition "Hommage à Barnett Newman" at the Berlin Nationalgalerie.
In 1964 Johannes Geccelli was guest lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, one year later he was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. In 1988, his colleagues at the academy, among them Georg Baselitz, created a portfolio with unique works as a farewell gift.
In 1980, through the mediation of George Rickey, Johannes Geccelli became a fellow at the Hand Hollow Foundation in East Chatham/New York and also worked as a visiting professor at Hunter College in New York City. In 1983 Johannes Geccelli received an invitation to the Center International d'Expérimentation Artistique in Boissano/Liguria. At the invitation of Sean Scully, Geccelli also lectured in Princeton. The artist received numerous honors and awards, among them a sponsorship award from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1958, the Villa Romana Prize in 1960, the Ruhr Prize for Art and Science in 1963 and the Lovis Corinth Prize in 1998. He rejected an invitation to teach at the New York School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in the early 1990s, and instead moved into a studio in Jühnsdorf near Berlin in 1994, where he would begin a particularly intensive final creative phase.
Johannes Geccelli died in Jühnsdorf, a district of Blankenfelde-Mahlow in Brandenburg, on June 23, 2011.