Many great artists labour for decades in obscurity and have to wait for a new generation to bend the course of art history before their prescient imagination is recognised.

The German-born but London-based artist Gustav Metzger, a proponent of environmental, politically engaged and interactive art since the Fifties, is one such godfather.

Aged 83, he’s landed his first retrospective at the Serpentine. Born in Germany in 1926, Metzger, a Jew, came to Britain in 1939. His parents were murdered in the Holocaust. He joined an anarchist commune and trained as a sculptor in the Forties and in 1959 he unveiled his own manifesto for “auto-destructive art”.

For the next five decades he would make art through processes of destruction, which, he made clear, would be a simple metaphor for the destructiveness of the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, environmental degradation and capitalism.

Thus we have cardboard packaging squished into Minimalist cubes, upturned trees buried on concrete, and a photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto obscured by rubble. The context, which the exhibition does not make enough of, was the networks of politicised artists in Europe in the Fifties and Sixties, which included the anarchistic Fluxus movement and the radical art of Joseph Beuys.

Aesthetes may feel Metzger is heavy-handed rather than simple and direct. Sometimes he looks like the Dave Spart of the British art world (in the interactive piece opening the exhibition, visitors are invited to sift through his collection of newspapers, dating back to the mid-Nineties, and pick out and pin up articles relating to the credit crunch).

Yet his work can be sensitive and beautiful, too — his multi-screen liquid crystal projections, which once formed part of the stage sets of The Who and Cream concerts, are mesmerising. Here, Metzger uses the basic principle of LCDs to create a display whose intensity of colour, texture and atmosphere recalls Rothko or Yves Klein.

Metzger is also a timely artist for an exhibition in a recession. He always expressed contempt for the art market and once attempted to organise a three-year artists’ strike in which no art would be produced. Predictably, he had to man the picket line on his own.
Until 8 November. Information: 020 7402 6075, www.serpentine.org.uk.