Gerard Wagner was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, April 5, 1906. He was two years old when his father died. A few years later he moved with his mother and two older brothers to England, where she had grown up. His schooling completed, he spent a year apprenticed to an Impressionist painter in the artists' colony of St. Ives in Cornwall, continuing his studies for a subsequent year at the Royal College of Art in London.

In 1926 he settled in Dornach, Switzerland, where he became acquainted with the art impulse of Rudolf Steiner, studying with the painter Henni Geck. The rest of his life was dedicated to the elaboration of this new direction in art. Evolving a method of working, both rigorous and conscientious, he sought to answer the fundamental question: How does living form arise out of colour?

This requires gradually freeing oneself of mental images on the one hand, and of all unconscious arbitrariness on the other. Gerard Wagner developed the capacity to create metamorphoses on the same principle as Nature does, transposed to the sphere of art. In this way he found access to the realm of formative forces. His painting clearly sets itself apart both from naturalism and from the abstract art of the 20th century.

In working out Rudolf Steiner's indications, Gerard Wagner returned painting, the “art of colour,” to its spiritual origins.