The artist Arnulf Rainer

Arnulf Rainer was born on December 8, 1929, in Baden near Vienna. Between 1940 and 1944, he attended the National Political Education Institute in Traiskirchen, Lower Austria. In his art classes, he painted cartographic landscapes inspired by aerial photographs, depicting bomb craters, fires, tanks, and airplanes, and avoided figures and faces. Forced by his teacher to draw from life, Arnulf Rainer left school in 1944 and decided to become an artist.

In 1945, he fled from the Russian occupation forces on a bicycle to Carinthia to visit relatives, where he created a series of deserted landscapes over the next few years. Arnulf Rainer attended the State Trade School (construction college) in Villach until his high school diploma. He discovered international contemporary art (Paul Nash, Francis Bacon, Stanley Spencer, and Henry Moore) at a British Council exhibition in Klagenfurt in 1947. Rainer subsequently also explored surrealist theories of revolution, which strongly influenced his work. He was particularly fascinated by the element of free imagination, especially after his dictatorial experiences in the National Socialist reformatory.

Despite a lack of motivation, Rainer graduated with good grades from the Villach State Trade School in 1949. He subsequently passed the entrance examination for graphic arts at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, but left the class the same day due to an artistic controversy with his assistant, Korunka. He also applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (painting class), but left that class three days after passing the entrance examination because his work was deemed degenerate. In the early 1950s, pronounced late-surrealist tendencies developed in Vienna, later summarized as the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism." Influenced by these tendencies, Arnulf Rainer created his own surreal drawings, but increasingly rebelled against the "art club" aestheticism. He founded his own group, the "Hundsgruppe," with Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hollegha, and Josef Mikl.

In March 1951, the first (and only) exhibition of the "Hundsgruppe" (Dog Group) took place in the rooms of the Vienna Society for Science and Art. The opening caused a veritable art scandal: Rainer, who called himself "TRRR" at the time, launched into a spontaneous tirade against the audience, full of disappointment over Ernst Fuchs's opening speech. Soon after the exhibition, Rainer turned away from fantasy and began his first experiments with working with his eyes closed (blind painting).

In the summer of 1951, Arnulf Rainer traveled to Paris with Maria Lassnig to meet André Breton – the "Father of Surrealism" – but his work disappointed her expectations. Instead, she became fascinated by another new art movement: l'art informel. Inspired by these works, Arnulf Rainer definitively abandoned his surrealist-figurative beginnings and, for the first time, adopted those abstract pictorial forms he called "microstructures" and "atomizations." From these "microstructures," he developed what he called "centralizations" and "central and vertical designs" (sparse drawings composed of only a few lines). Due to a lack of materials, Arnulf Rainer also began to paint over other artists' paintings for the first time during this period.

Between 1953 and 1959, Arnulf Rainer lived as an ascetic in his parents' empty, abandoned villa in Gainfarn, Lower Austria. There he began his "Reductions," a group of works consisting of austere monochrome black images with linearly geometrically defined white spaces, which are considered a precursor to the overpaintings. In 1953, he met the cathedral preacher Monsignor Otto Mauer in Vienna, who later founded the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, which became a meeting place for the Austrian avant-garde.

From then on (until around 1965), Rainer focused on his overpaintings. He experimented with different forms of support. He created round paintings, but also incorporated cruciform forms. On September 17, 1959, Arnulf Rainer founded the "Pintorarium" together with Ernst Fuchs and Friedensreich Hundertwasser, as a "creatorium for the cremation of the academy." The Pintorarium remained in existence until 1968.

In the mid-1960s, Arnulf Rainer began his experiments with drawing while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Stimulated by the drugs and his intensive preoccupation with the paintings of the mentally ill, he developed a hallucinatory, almost frenetic working method, unconsciously drawing on his own figurative, surrealist beginnings, while the experiences of overpainting remained visible.

In 1966, Arnulf Rainer received the Austrian State Prize for Graphic Arts, and the Museum of the 20th Century organized the first major retrospective of his work in 1968.

During this period, Arnulf Rainer took photographs of grimaces with and without face paint (either in a photo booth or by a photographer), which he then painted on and over. The grimaces and behaviors of the mentally ill, with which he intensively explored them, represented a rich potential for expression for Rainer.

He writes: "The faces I used to draw all had impossible wrinkles, fake furrows, invented accentuations. I was missing them in the photographs. When I painted them on my cheeks and went for a walk with them, I felt like a new person (...). Only when I began to rework the photos of my facial expressions into drawings did I discover surprising things: all sorts of new, unknown people lurking inside me, but whom my muscles alone couldn't express." (Arnulf Rainer, Hirndrang. Ed. by Otto Breicha, Verlag Galerie Welz Salzburg 1980, p. 106).

Rainer thus creates a kind of hybrid between theatrical and graphic mediums of expression, drawing close to the Viennese Actionists Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, without, however, ever belonging to their group. Numerous series of reworked grimace photographs, the so-called "Face Farces," emerge during this phase.

Rainer describes the divergent artistic approach as follows: "(...) the Actionists (...) attempted to explicate latent content in a theatrical language and through certain sequences. However, posture and body shapes played a very subordinate role. While the materials and the handling of them were something very essential (...)."

The Kunstverein Hamburg dedicated its first major retrospective in Germany to Arnulf Rainer in 1971. That same year, he was also represented at the 11th Sao Paulo Biennale and participated in Documenta 5 (1972), 6 (1977), and 7 (1982). In 1974, he was awarded the City of Vienna Art Prize, but refused to attend the award ceremony, which led to the prize being revoked.

In 1978 he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale and in the same year received the Austrian State Prize “in recognition of his work in the field of fine art”.

He expanded his artistic technique through the media of video and film, using sequences from these films as the basis for his photo reworkings. He also began working on "gestural hand paintings" and later on "finger and foot paintings." This also marked the beginning of his long-term collaboration with Dieter Roth: mixed and separated art.

"Since this hand and finger painting experiment, it has happened to me repeatedly that, at a certain level of nervous excitement, I drop the brush, dip my hands in paint, and shape them with two or three fingers or smear them with my whole hand, primarily on older, fragmentary paintings with which I hadn't made any progress. I had discovered a method within myself, I had found a psychic layer within me that gave me the strength to go all out and, through an aggressive act of reworking and destruction, to create a better one from a half-decent old painting." (Arnulf Rainer, 1974)

Arnulf Rainer was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and a member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin in 1981. Unknown perpetrators destroyed 26 paintings in Rainer's studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1994, prompting Rainer to retire at his own request in 1995.

Several major retrospectives indicate Arnulf Rainer's growing international importance:

1984 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris

1989 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York

2000 - on the occasion of his 70th birthday - at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Kunstforum Wien

Various awards and honors underscore this status: In 2002, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich dedicated a special room to Rainer, in which some of his works are permanently displayed. The following year, he received the Rhenus Art Prize for his entire oeuvre, and in 2004, the Catholic Faculty of the University of Münster awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 2006, he received an honorary doctorate in theology from the Catholic Theological University. Private University Linz and, as the first non-Spanish artist, the Aragón-Goya Prize for his lifetime achievement. In September 2009, the Arnulf Rainer Museum in the former women's baths in Baden near Vienna opened with the exhibition "All Beginnings Are Difficult. Early Works 1949–1961." In April 2015, Arnulf Rainer was awarded the "Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, 1st Class." In April 2025, he received the "Grand Decoration in Gold for Services to the Republic of Austria."

Arnulf Rainer lives and works in Upper Austria and Tenerife.