Arnulf Rainer (1929)
Austria


Biography :

"Arnulf Rainer was born in 1928 in Baden, near Vienna (Austria). He studied architecture at the Villach School (1947-1949), then studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna (1950). Arnulf Rainer will be co-founder of the Hundsgruppe (“Dog Group”), a group of revolutionary and surrealist inspiration which develops existential work close to Body Art.
Before 1951, his works presented a fantastic, sometimes morbid universe, influenced by surrealist theories. He drew non-figurative works in 1951 (“Les Yeux Closes”), the year he met André Breton, whom he considered disappointing. His first personal exhibition was organized in 1951 (Galerie Kleinmayr, Klagenfurt, Austria). The following year, he began the cycle of “Übermalungen”, monochrome covering paintings; if in this last series, the artist partly repainted his own canvases, he also stubbornly erased those of others. Works by Van Gogh, Goya, Rembrandt, Vedova or Vasarely, and many others, will thus be denied, covered up or crossed out.
In 1959, he created an “anti-academy” in Vienna with Hundertwasser and Fuchs. At the beginning of the 1960s, Arnulf Rainer began a series of photographs, redrawn self-portraits which constitute a repertoire of human expressions.
Arnulf Rainer began engraving in 1965. At the end of the same decade, the artist flogged, flayed, disfigured and tortured his own image (“Faces-Farces”). This work becomes the backbone of his work. In search of transformation of his self, Rainer photographs his hands, his feet, his fingers, lovers, trances and ecstasies. The artist then begins the series of death masks and painted corpses. From 1982, Arnulf Rainer began the cycle of the “Hiroshima” and “Stigmatized Christs” series. In the 90s and 2000s, Rainer painted the Cosmos and covered portraits of film and music stars.
Arnulf Rainer lives and works in Vienna and Enzenkirchen."
(Source, website, Galerie MChampetier)

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