Background
Arnulf Rainer was born on December 8, 1929, in Baden bei Wien, Lower Austria, Austria.
Vienna, Austria
Arnulf Rainer applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a painting class, but three days after passing the entrance exam he left this class. He also was a professor there from 1981 till 1995.
Arnulf Rainer was born on December 8, 1929, in Baden bei Wien, Lower Austria, Austria.
Between 1940 and 1944, Arnulf Rainer attended the National Political Institute of Education in Traiskirchen, Lower Austria. In the art lessons, his paintings were inspired by aerial photography and cartographic landscapes with bomb craters, fires, tanks and aircraft, and avoided figures and faces. When his teacher tried to force him to draw from nature, he left the school in 1944 and decided to become an artist.
Arnulf Rainer attended the vocational school (building and architecture) in Villach, and discovered international contemporary art (Paul Nash, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore) at a British Council exhibition in Klagenfurt in 1947.
Arnulf left the Villach vocational school in 1949 with good exam results. He then passed the entrance exam to do graphic arts at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts but left the class on the same day because of artistic differences with an assistant professor. He also applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, a painting class, but three days after passing the entrance exam he left this class too, when his work was described as degenerate.
In the 1950s, Rainer experimented with his overpaintings, covering up previously created drawings with layers of paint and creating a singular, dominant monochrome work.
Towards the late 1950s, he began overpainting photographs of himself in expressive, distorted self-portraits. His 1970s pieces reflect his meditations on death, evident in his overpainting of deaths masks, mummies, and crucifixion images.
In 1978 and in 1980, Arnulf Rainer became the Austrian representative at the Venice Biennale. From 1981 to 1995, Rainer held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He lives and works in Vienna, Bavaria and Teneriffa.
Arnulf Rainer is considered one of the most inventive Abstract painters of the 20th century. He is known for frequently masking and overpainting illustrations and photographs in his work.
Rainer’s work is also shown permanently at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and retrospectives of his work have been held at the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna, the Kunsthalle Bern, the National Gallery in Berlin, and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among other institutions.
In 1993 and 2009 The Arnulf Rainer Museums were opened in New York and Baden, Austria.
Head of the Diver (Deny Your Birth)
1950The Water is a Naked Box
1950Blume
1957A Nose Adjustment (Face Farce)
1971A Nose Adjustment (Face Farce)
1971Krass
1973The Great Composers
1973Untitled (Body Language)
1973Untitled (Death Mask)
1978Untitled (Death Mask)
1978Untitled (Death Mask)
1978Wine Crucifix
1978Backbone
1979Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1982Quotations: "The principles of my works - are the extinction of expression, permanent covering and contemplative tranquility... My ideal is the completely dark picture, full of some overwhelming silence."
Arnulf Rainer is the co-founder of Hundsgruppe ("Group of the dog"), a group of revolutionary and surrealist inspiration who develops an existential work close to the Body Art Movement. He was a member of the Lord Jim Lodge.