Arnulf Rainer
CROSS
"The Cross can convey the meaning"
5 May – 8 November, 2010
Arnulf Rainer’s work has moved into the historic spaces of the Frauenbad: an architecture whose bathing pools and changing stalls refer to its former life as a healing bathing-hall.
And in this entirely unexpected spatial framework, we find a serial presentation of the cross.
Crosses and crucifixions permeate the artist’s entire oeuvre: not as a core theme, but indeed presenting an ever-present potential for renewed access, for relentless striving after an omnipresent form.
Arnulf Rainer avoids religious dimensions and theological deliberations. He does not wish to produce sacred paintings. Arnulf Rainer’s crosses and crucifixions are therefore to be interpreted in terms of the act of painting’s elementary sensuality, which they seek to perpetuate.
This dialogue between image and space; between color and sign; between the cross and spirituality liberates manifold associations.
The colorful cross looms over the bathing basin that has been known since early Christianity as the baptistry, where sign of the cross and water join to a life-giving effect.
The cross’s position above the source of eternal life is, in the secularism of the Frauenbad presentation, only vaguely perceptible, but wishes neither to force itself into the foreground nor to surrender its mystical meaning.
The museum’s exhibited crosses are the works of an artist struggling
with his painting and evidence of a creative process that spans more
than half a century. And so it is quite distinctly not the two-time
doctor theologicus honoris causa but rather the painter who is
speaking about the conditions and effects of his painting when he
remarks, as in a 1992 conversation with P. Friedhelm Mennekes, “The
cross can convey the meaning.”
Curator Dr. Reinhold Baumstark
General director of the Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen from
1999-2009; previously general director of the Bavarian National
Museum and 16-year director of the collection of the Prince of
Liechtenstein.
