Arnulf Rainer, the Austrian artist whose relentless drive for experimentation made him a key determine of Europe’s postwar scene, died on December 18 at 96 at his house in Austria. His loss of life was confirmed by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac.
Born in Baden, Austria, in 1929, Rainer spent greater than seven many years trying to find new modes of expression, producing a physique of summary work that’s most carefully related to the Artwork Informel motion.
He’s finest recognized for his Übermalungen (“overpaintings”), a method he started in 1952 during which he layered dense strokes of pigment over present photographs—at first his personal photographs, and, from 1953 onward, these of different artists resembling Italian painter Emilio Vedova. Rainer’s ensuing works, seemingly without delay damaging and devotional, turned portray right into a web site of erasure, accumulation, and non secular immersion.
“The natural act of making is probably extra important than the finished portray,” he as soon as mentioned, likening the method to a contemplative ritual.
Throughout the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s, Rainer turned his painterly consideration to the physique and self. His “blind drawings,” in addition to the “Face Farces” and “Physique Poses” sequence featured overpainted photographic self-portraits whose gestural marks sophisticated the artist’s presentation of his personal psyche. Although not a Viennese Actionist, he exerted a catalytic affect on the motion’s early years.
Rainer’s engagement with postwar trauma additionally formed his work. His 1951 photographic portfolio “Views of Destruction” listed the catastrophic losses of the latest previous—Hiroshima, the Holocaust, conflict and wreckage—and his subsequent layers of black, matte, and shiny paint grew to become what artwork historian Helmut Friedel described as a “painterly pores and skin during which historical past is safely saved.” Rainer later tailored this strategy to enlarged photo-booth self-portraits, attacking the floor with paint utilized by hand, producing hybrid photographs that fused illustration with abstraction.
By the late Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, main establishments had begun to acknowledge his significance. He acquired an early survey in 1968 on the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (now known as Mumok) in Austria; participated within the 1972, 1977, and 1982 editions of Documenta in Kassel, Germany; and gained worldwide prominence after exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern and the Lenbachhaus Munich in 1977.
He represented Austria on the 1978 Venice Biennale, the identical yr he acquired the Grand Austrian State Prize. Within the Nineteen Eighties, he continued to have main exhibitions on the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Abbazia di San Gregorio in Venice, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He additionally taught on the Academy of Nice Arts in Vienna from 1981 to 1995.
His work is included in dozens of main museum collections in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. In 2009, the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in Baden, which celebrated his ninety fifth birthday with a monographic exhibition in 2024.
“An artist makes the previous his personal and provides one thing new,” artwork historian Rudi H. Fuchs as soon as wrote of the artist whom he included in Documenta 7. Rainer’s supplier Thaddaeus Ropac, who labored with the artist for greater than 4 many years, known as him “a real innovator,” including: “He by no means stopped pushing the boundaries of what artwork may very well be and the way it may very well be created.”
Artwork critic Donald Kuspit maybe put it finest: in Rainer’s palms, gesture regained not solely its uncooked power however its “significance as an indicator of interior thriller.”
