Arnulf Rainer

Artist Biography

1929
Arnulf Rainer is born on 8 December in Baden bei Wien

1940-44
He attends the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt (reform school) in Traiskirchen, Lower Austria. At school, art lessons deal mainly with war themes. Rainer draws cartographic landscapes inspired by aerial photography and dotted with bomb craters, fires, tanks und airplanes; he avoids figures and portraits.

1944
He leaves school after the new art teacher insists he should draw from nature; he decides instead to become an artist.

1945-47
He draws a series of deserted Kärnten landscapes.

1947
At a British Council exhibition in Klagenfurt, Rainer discovers international contemporary art (Paul Nash, Francisc Bacon, Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore). He begins to draw faces and people.

1947-1949
To please his parents, he studies structural engineering at the Staatsgewerbeschule in Villach (Hochbau); however, he often misses class to spend time drawing.

1948
Rainer absorbs himself in surrealist revolutionary theories, which strongly influence his work. He intensifies contact with the writers Michael Guttenbrunner and Max Hölzer in Klagenfurt, and begins a friendship with 28-year-old painter Maria Lassnig.

1949
Despite having little enthusiasm for structural engineering, Rainer graduates with good grades from the Staatsgewerbeschule Villach. He subsequently passes the entrance examination in graphic arts at the Akademie für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, but leaves the class on his first day after an artistic disagreement with the professorial assistant Korunka.
Shortly afterward, he applies to the painting department at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, but leaves three days after passing the entrance exam when his art is labelled "degenerate”. He refuses to enter the academy for many years thereafter.

1950
During the early 1950s, the Late Surrealist style become popular in Vienna. Proponents of the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism" include Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner and Anton Lehmden.Their pictures are reminiscent of the old masters, exhibiting an obsession with detail, sharp contours and multiple glazes. Many Late Surrealists are also members of the "Art Club," a group founded three years earlier by artists and art historians.
Rainer travels back and forth between St. Georgen, Klagenfurt, and Vienna. In April, Max Hölzer and Edgar Jené publish the first "surrealist publications." Influenced by their writings as well as by the prevailing tendency towards Fantastic Realism , Rainer creates surreal drawings with extremely dense details during these years, but grows increasingly resistant to the "Art Club" aesthetic.
He founds a separate group with Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hollegha and Josef Mikl called the "Hundsgruppe." Rainer's contribution to the first (and last) Hundsgruppe exhibition is the graphic portfolio "Cave Canem," featuring his first use of transparent drawing material.

1950-51
That winter, Rainer lives in Ottakring, the 16th district of Vienna. He produces his first hyper drawing, "Ozean, Ozean", in a small, dark room in his lodgings.

1951
In March, the first (and only) Hundsgruppe show opens in the Wiener Gesellschaft für Wissenschaft und Kunst. Despite the presence of abstract works by Mikl and Hollegha, there is an excess of surrealist and phantasmagoric works - Rainer himself has not yet fully distanced himself from Surrealism. The exhibition opening turns into a true art scandal: Rainer, who at that time calls himself "Trrr"- meant to recall a dog's growl -spontaneously starts to insult the audience during Ernst Fuchs's opening speech. Climbing up a ladder, he shouts, "I spit on you all-you with your rotten conception of art!" Thus begins Tachisme in Vienna. (1)
After the exhibition, Rainer turns away from Fantastic art and begins his first attempts to work with closed eyes (Blind Paintings). He writes, "In 1951, at 20 years old, I first began to draw with closed eyes. My belief in the art produced up to then had been extinguished; I was in crisis, back at square one. I didn't know how, what, what for, or why. I needed to do something totally new, something that had never been done before. Coming from Surrealism, I was interested in the ideology of psychic automatism. So I decided to close my eyes and discover something new, something subconscious." (2)
In the summer, Rainer and Lassnig travel to Paris to visit André Breton, who greatly disappoints their expectations. By contrast, they are deeply impressed by the "other," new art that Michel Tapié launches with the exhibition Véhemences Confrontées at Galerie Nina Dausset: l'art informel. The exhibition presents pieces by Bryen, Capogrossi, de Kooning, Hartung, Mathieu, Pollock, Riopelle, Russell und Wols. Inspired above all by the work of Wols and Hartung, Rainer decisively turns away from his surrealist-figurative early works, producing instead abstract images he calls "microstructures" and "atomizations." These compositions feature finely felted textures and graphic frizzing woven organically into each other, and surfaces lacking clear centre points.
After their return from Paris, Rainer and Lassnig organize an exhibition of recent, non-figurative art at the Kärntner Kunstverein. Rainer contributes his "atomarer Malerei, Blindmalerei, expression élémentaire" (atomic painting, blind painting, elemental expression). Under the pseudonym Zuzlu, he also shows the so-called "nada painting," empty picture frames hanging on the walls. The photographic portfolio "Perspectives of Destruction" (later published with Wolfgang Kudrofsky) becomes the summary of these newly-developed dissolutions of form and micro-morphologies.

¹ Alfred Schmeller quoted by Otto Breicha, Trrr, Ein Versuch. In: Hirndrang, published by Otto Breicha, Verlag Galerie Welz Salzburg, 1980, p.24
² Arnulf Rainer, Blindzeichnungen. In: Arnulf Rainer - Hirndrang, op. cit., p.121

1952
From the microstructures, Rainer moves to the "centralizations," "central and vertical designs"-minimal images composed of just a few strokes. The pictures are painted onto burlap and over older paintings that he purchases at auctions. Lacking material, Rainer performs his first illicit overpaintings on images that don't belong to him, signing them "TRRR."
In February, the artist presents his newest works in the Galerie Kleinmayr in Klagenfurt. In March he has a solo exhibition in the Zimmergalerie Franck in Frankfurt am Main, today considered the first manifestation of Art Informel in Central Europe. The accompanying catalogue prints Rainer's manifestos, "Malerei um die Malerei zu verlassen" (Painting in Order to Leave Painting) and "Das Eine gegen das Andere" (One Versus the Other).
He travels to Paris a second time.

1953-59
Rainer lives ascetically in an abandoned, unfurnished villa in Gainfarn, near Bad Vöslau, Lower Austria. Here he begins "reductions," a group of starkly monochrome black pictures with linear, geometrically delineated white sections. These, as well as the "Grundmalerei" series - monochrome, mostly black pictures with a velvety surface reminiscent of primed canvas - are precursors to overpainting.
In Vienna in 1953 he meets the Catholic preacher and art patron Monsignore Otto Mauer, a key figure in his artistic development. One year later, Otto Mauer founds the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, thus providing a critical venue for the Austrian avant-garde.

1953-1954
Rainer is preoccupied with concerns of proportion, which he explores in his "Proportion Studies": "In 1953 I decided to take a step that seemed dialectic at the time: I attempted an art form that based itself solely on the proportions of colour weight, surface area, and volume. The foundations were colour collages that I created by means of parallel shifts of coloured papers through balance tests. For technical reasons, the coloured paper lay horizontally, so that to this day it is difficult for me to determine up from down, right from left … The colour proportions were the basis for around 100 oil paintings and 30 sculptures, nearly all of which I subsequently destroyed in a fit of despair after a disastrous show in the Vienna Galerie Würthle in the autumn of 1954." (3)
³ Arnulf Rainer, Dialektisch. In : Arnulf Rainer – Hirndrang, op.cit., p.52/53

1954
The Galerie nächst St. Stephan becomes the meeting place for the young generation and, under the sponsorship of Monsignore Otto Mauer, is a safe haven for Tachisme's abstract lyricism in conservative Vienna.
Rainer produces overpaintings with increasing frequency: painted central forms are worked over so often that the original image becomes obliterated by a black surface. The principle of central design remains evident through the extension of these black surfaces from the centre to the picture edges. Rainer describes this phase thus: "At that time, I found myself … desiring metamorphosis, in part through contrary approaches to image. After the proportion studies, in 1954/55 I decided to again take up my gesticulative-expressive concept of 1951/52. However, I was not as successful as I had originally been. In my dissatisfaction I corrected the paintings constantly, until they became darker and darker. That is how, without any grand ideas, the overpaintings began." (4)
From here on (until around 1965), Rainer concentrates mainly on this genre, experimenting with various formats: sometimes round images, but increasingly he incorporates the cross form. He chooses the cross in part because it returns to his intense interest in mystical content, but the stark, symbolic form also displays the tension between a form and its expressionistic treatment. Along with the overpaintings, Rainer begins his first photo poses, anticipating-as in the Blind Drawings-his later interest in body language. He will later overpaint some of these staged photographic self-portraits.

⁴ Arnulf Rainer, written correspondence from 1981

1955
Rainer's first solo exhibition in the Galerie St. Stephan.
Near the end of the year, the St. Stephan group gathers at the shared studio of Prachensky and Hollegha in Vienna's Liechtensteinstrasse. Prachensky, Hollegha, Mikl und Rainer agree that, in order to meet their rigorous quality requirements, the Galerie nächst St. Stephan should be devoted exclusively to their work. Unfortunately, this decree has little effect, because the group begins to dissolve soon after taking over from Art Informel.

1956-57
The crucifixion series is created: Rainer assembles 15 various-sized hardboard crosses and paints over them.
Along with three colleagues from the Gruppe St. Stephan, Hollegha, Mikl und Prachensky, he develops the exhibition Monochrome Komplexe (Schwarzmalerei, Blauserie und Rotbilder) for the Wiener Sezession.
In the so-called "Bildverbrennungsaktion" (picture-burning action) in 1957, he destroys some proportion collages as well as other early works in his Gainfarn studio.

1958
Rainer produces "Monochrome Gründe" (Monochrome paintings) and NNN-Malerei.
He gives a lecture, "10 Theses toward a Progressive Art," on 11 January in the Galerie nächst St. Stefan and co-authors with Prachensky the manifesto "Architecture with Hands."

1958-63
Sam Francis, Georges Mathieu, Emilio Vedova, Viktor Vasarely und many other artists give Rainer works to overpaint.

1959
Rainer obtains a larger studio in Wollzeile 36 in Vienna's first district.
On 17 September he founds the "Pintatorium," a "Creatorium for the Cremation of the Academy" with the painters Ernst Fuchs and Friedensreich Hundertwasser. A manifesto pamphlet reads: "In order to rescue the centre of today's culture – painting - from castration by the academy, it is necessary to contaminate the youth with an imagination, with the notion of a centre, a nest, a cave, in which creative life has enough light and air to flourish. This imagination will give them enough strength to boycott our art schools and to leave, because every form of schooling ends here today." (5)
The Pintatorium continues until 1968, when the authorities disband it. Filmmaker Peter Kubelka begins to shoot the film "Arnulf Rainer," composed solely of white and black images.
⁵ Arnulf Rainer, Manifest zur Gründung des Pintorariums, September 1959

1960
Rainer takes part in the "Monochrome Malerei" exhibition (featuring, among others, Fontana, Manzoni, Klein, Rothko, Geiger, and Girke) in Leverkusen.
The series "Stämme" arises as a continuation of the vertical designs of 1952.

1961
Rainer is sentenced in a Wolfsburg court after publicly overpainting a prize-winning picture. At the opening of the exhibition "Junge Stadt sieht junge Kunst" (A Young City Sees Young Art) he purposely overpaints another award-winning work, "Mond und Figuren II" by the Schoeppenstadt graphic artist Helga Pape, and staples to the picture a card printed, "Overpainted by Arnulf Rainer." The press reports state: "Quickly summoned, the police arrested the 'blackouter,' interviewed him and held him temporarily in a prison cell. The Hildesheim state advocate's office has now filed charges for 'deliberately damaging an art object that had been publicly displayed by smearing an engraving in the exhibition "Junge Stadt sieht junge Kunst" with black paint - punishable by order § 304 STGB.' The fine expected to be levied at the Viennese art attacker is, as we understand, considerable." (6)
⁶ From the magazine : Vernissage ; Kunst, Kritik, Kontakte, 1961

1962
Rainer is invited to exhibitions in Düsseldorf (Galerie Schmela), Karlsruhe (Galerie Rottloff), and Tokyo. He participates in the Graphic Biennale in Milan und in the Comparaisons exhibition in the Musée National d'art moderne in Paris.

1963
He obtains a second studio in West Berlin that he keeps until 1967.
In the autumn he produces a portfolio of 10 dry-point etchings called "Haute Coiffure."
He begins to collect drawings by mentally disturbed artists.

1964/65
Rainer begins to experiment with drawing under the influence of alcohol and drugs. His preoccupation with altered perception and with the work of mentally ill artists takes his work style in a hallucinatory, almost frenetic direction. He begins to refer unconsciously to his own figurative, surrealistic beginnings, even though clear echoes of overpainting are still evident. He produces starkly coloured overpaintings, explosions, comet trails and arches.
Rainer resumes drawing on transparent foils (Ultraphan) to incorporate the print/graphic aesthetic.

1966
The newly created works are exhibited in the Galerie Peithner-Lichtenfels in Vienna. Rainer receives the Austrian state prize for graphic arts.
Doctors at the Lausanne University clinic film him drawing there under the influence of psilocybin.

1967
Rainer obtains an even larger studio on Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna's sixth district, where he produces his new "Hyperzeichnungen" (Hyper Drawings). His own publishing house, based in Vienna and Berlin, releases the "Wahnhall" portfolio, and during a television interview, Rainer vows to paint the world's 65,000 most important historical personalities. At the opening of a Pintorarium exhibition in Munich, Rainer performs his first body painting: he draws a large black vertical line along a naked blonde woman's back. At the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich, he works under the influence of LSD.

1968
In February, Rainer presents his first visual auteur work in Vienna: he paints his face and hands black. The Museum des 20. Jahrhundert organizes a large retrospective of his work.

1969
Rainer exhibits in Cologne, Innsbruck, Bremen, Linz, Munich, and Berlin.
He produces grimacing photos with and without face paint (they are taken either in photo booths or by a photographer) that he then paints and overpaints. The grimaces and contorted poses of the mentally ill present Rainer with an abundance of expressive potential. He writes, "The faces that I drew earlier all had impossible wrinkles, false furrows, invented accentuations. These were missing from the photographs. When I finally brushed them onto the cheeks and went for a walk, I felt like a new man … When I began to draw over the photos of my mimicked farces, I discovered something surprising: All sorts of new, unknown people lurked within me, that my muscles alone were not able to formulate." (7)
Rainer hereby creates a kind of mixed medium between forms of theatrical and graphic expression (reminiscent of his earlier actions: insulting the audience in 1951, the Wolfsburg affair, intoxication experiments, collaboration with Peter Kubelka, etc.) and draws closer to the Vienna Actionists Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, without ever really belonging to the group. Rainer describes the diverging artistic approaches: "… the Actionists (…) tried to explicate content that existed only in a latent form through theatrical language and by means of certain processes. Posture and poses played a subordinate role, while the material and its treatment were more vital, more substantial (…) For me, the material is actually very secondary and I now work entirely without objects of any kind (…) For me, it's simply about physical-corporeal expression." (8)
⁷ Arnulf Rainer - Hirndrang, op. cit., p.106
⁸ Arnulf Rainer, Noch vor der Sprache. In: Hirndrang, op.cit., p.100

1970
Rainer creates countless series of overpainted grimace photos: the "Face Farces." Because the photos do not quite capture the nervous excitement of forming a grimace, he attempts to exaggerate this by drawing over the images. Later, he features his entire body contorted into expressive postures: "Hand Poses," "Knee, Lying, and Sitting Poses," "Mouthpieces," "Knee Series," "Rubber Band Series," "Yoga," etc.
Rainer overpaints and overdraws not only his own gestures and poses, but later also - in series - photographs of psychotic body language.
He produces the series "Katatonika" (1972/76), Felsen (Rocks) (1974/76), Höhlen (Caves) (1975/77), Untergrundarchitektur (Unterground Architecture) (1975/77), "Frauenposen" (Women Poses) (1977), "Lesbische Frauenliebe" (Lesbian Love) (1977), "Totenmasken" (Death Masks)(1977/78).

1971
Rainer takes part in the exhibition "Anfänge des Informel in Österreich 1949-1953" (Beginnings of Art Informel in Austria). The Kunstverein Hamburg dedicates the first large German retrospective to his work. Furthermore, he presents 38 works at the 11th Sao Paulo Biennale. He acquires a studio in Cologne.

1972
Rainer expands his technique to include video and film. He produces a series of visual recordings that are also strongly self-representational, using frames from these films as the basis for photographic overpainting. Cross overpaintings and photo overpaintings (Face Farces) are shown at the documenta 5 in Kassel.

1973
Rainer begins working with "gestural hand paintings," which also include "finger- and foot-paintings." He writes: "The gestures of groping, stroking, or hitting may have their concrete activation in video art as touching, slapping, or anointing someone with oil, but the sheer traces of fingers on a clean white surface make my heart race enough to imagine the hard-edged, white canvas as a lover. Those traces might be deemed as having painterly qualities." (9)
The first exhibition of these works takes place in 1974 in the Kunstraum München. Creation of the series "Stirnserie" (Brow Series) and "Mouthpieces."
⁹ Arnulf Rainer, Das Bild als Partner. In: Hirndrang, op.cit., p.119

1974
The city of Vienna awards Rainer its highest art prize. However, he declines to attend the awards ceremony, and the award is retracted. He begins a longtime collaboration with Dieter Roth: "Mixed and Separate Art." Together, they create videotapes, mixed media works, and the film "Misplaced and Futile”. Kubelka's film, "Arnulf Rainer as filmed by Peter Kubelka", is given a public screening

1975
Rainer remains inspired by the work of artist colleagues. He produces countless series of "Kunst über Kunst" (Art on Art): He overpaints photographs in the style of Gustave Doré, Zanetti, Leonardo, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Vincent Van Gogh, etc. Edition Hundertmark publishes the photographic portfolio "Nervenkramp" (Nerve Cramp). Rainer is forced to leave his Cologne studio when the building is demolished.

1977
He begins the series of overpaintings inspired by Austrian baroque sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's expressive "character heads."?Further works include the cycles "Frauenposen" (Women Poses), "Ekstasen" (Ecstasies), "Lovers," "Trancen," (Trances), "Künstlertiere" (Artists' Animals), and "Totenmasken" (Death Masks). He participates in documenta 6.

1978
Rainer's body language pieces represent Austria at the Venice Biennale. In November, he recieves the Grossen Österreichischen Staatspreis "in honour of his achievements in the field of fine art”.

1979
Rainer produces the sequences "Nijinski," "Leichengesichter" (Corpse Faces) und "Nachmalungen (Kopien von Schimpansenmalereien)" (Copies of Chimpanzee Paintings).
He and Dieter Roth create an action piece for the Vienna Biennale for New Art, "Expansion," at the Wiener Secession.

1980
Rainer purchases studios in Upper Austria und Bavaria (Kloster Vornbach near Passau).
A selection of his hand- and fingerpaintings is shown in the documenta 7. He returns to religious themes: "Crosses: Representations of Christ."

1981
Rainer is named Professor at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

1984
"Mort et Sacrifice," a retrospective in the Musée National d'Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

1986
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York acquires a large Face Farce painting.

1987
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchases one of the large, recently-produced crosses.

1989
A comprehensive retrospective show that opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, to the Historischen Museum of Vienna and (in 1990) to the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, as well as the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.

1991/92
Rainer begins work on the "Märtyrer- und Katastrophenbildern" (Martyr and Catastrophe Portraits) und on the "Engel-Serie" (Angel Series).

1993/94
He produces a series of "Kosmos-Bilder" (Cosmos Images).

1994
After unidentified criminals break into the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and destroy 26 of Rainer's paintings, he decides to retire, in 1995

1996
The Kärntner Galerie in Vienna hosts the first exhibition of the Mikrokosmos, Makrokosmos paintings that Rainer has been working on since 1994. The artist uses new techniques and materials, including corrugated aluminium, cardboard strengthened with pellet-gun shells, rootlike structures made of cardboard, geological formations, and star and celestial forms. Rainer begins working on the Bibelillustrationen (Bible Illustrations).

2000
The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Vienna's Kunstforum host parallel retrospective shows in honour of Rainer's 70th birthday.

2001
The Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus in Munich exhibits the Bible Illustrations from the Frieder Burda collection.

2002
The Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich dedicates an entire room to the permanent display of Rainer's work..

2003
Rainer receives the Rhenus Art Prize for his oeuvre; he is the third artist, after Baselitz and Polke, to be thus honoured.
The Museo Correr exhibits the Canova-Rainer series. Rainer takes up photography, at first as references for his overpaintings, but they soon are no longer re-worked and instead remain independent works. Galerie Karl Pfefferle in Munich exhibits these new photographic pieces, which depict subjects under water or swimming just above the surface.

2003/04
During the XI. Biennale d'Arte Sacra, the Museo diocesano di Sant'Apollonia, in Venice shows a selection of Rainer's religious works under the title "Arnulf Rainer - Sotto la Croce".

2004
The Kunsthalle der Jesuitenkirche in Aschaffenburg dedicates an entire show to Rainer. On 25 June, the Catholic Faculty of the University of Münster presents him with an honorary doctorate.

2005
The private museum la maison rouge, fondation antoine de galbert in Paris exhibits a comparative show of its own Rainer works with selections from his collection, arnulf rainer et sa collection d'art brut. The Sammlung Essl in Klosterneuburg exhibits Rainer alongside Antoni Tàpies, Tàpies - Rainer, Porteurs de Secret. At the same time, the Armandomuseum in Amersfoort shows "Körpersprache - Landschaftssprache".

2006
On 18 May, Arnulf Rainer is awarded an honorary doctorate in theology from the Kath.-Theol. Privatuniversität Linz. The Comunidad de Madrid und the CAAM in Gran Canaria host the exhibition "Arnulf Rainer - Dieter Roth, Mezclarse y Separarse". On 29 September, Rainer is the first non-Spanish artist to receive the Aragón-Goya Preis for his life's work und for his artistic affinity with Francisco de Goya.
The Museo de Zaragoza honours him with an exhibition of the Goya overpaintings from the 1980s and from 2005/2006. The MAK in Vienna presents a collection of original poster designs in the exhibition "RAINER, sonst keiner!". Überschriftungen.
Longtime collector Frieder Burda displays a series of Bible Overpaintings in his Baden-Baden museum.

2007
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles shows the poster design exhibition under the title “Arnulf Rainer. Hyper-Graphics.”
Gallery Heike Curtze premiers Rainer’s new work in an exhibition titled “Fotos maltrechas/Fehlfotografie” (Failed Photography). In these pieces, the artist adorns his own photographs with graphisms.
The exhibition “Arnulf Rainer – Dieter Roth. Misch- und Trennkunst” travels to the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.

2008
Galerie Kovacek in Vienna shows works from the “Kanarien” (Canaries) series of 2006-2007. For its grand re-opening, the Schiller-Museum in Weimar displays an exhibition on Victor Hugo, presenting a selection from Rainer’s “Hugo-Zyklus” (Hugo Cycle). The Belvedere Gallery in Vienna hosts a show of substantial works from Rainer’s and Roth’s “Misch- und Trennkunst” in the Orangerie.

2009
Grand opening of the Arnulf Rainer Museum Frauenbad, Baden bei Wien with the exhibition “The Beginning is Always the Hardest. Early Works 1949 – 1961”.

2010
Exhibition at the Alte Pinaktohek, Munich

2012
In January, Arnulf Rainer donated 40 paintings and 70 works on paper to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany.