Arnulf Rainer is one of Austria's most internationally renowned artists. His works were exhibited at documenta II in Kassel as early as 1959, followed by further participations in 1972 and 1977. In 1977, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover dedicated comprehensive retrospectives to him, and in 1978 he represented Austria at the 38th Venice Biennale. In 2019/20, the Albertina in Vienna once again held a solo exhibition honoring Rainer's outstanding work. Since the early 1950s, Rainer has shaped post-war art with his characteristic overpainting technique. In 1949, after only a few days, he left the Vienna University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts and continued his education as an autodidact. Rejecting traditional painting, he developed his overpaintings – a "painting to leave painting behind." A visit to the Nina Dausset Gallery in Paris, which featured works by Jean Dubuffet and early Tachists, among others, inspired him to explore automatism, blind painting, and optical decomposition.
From the mid-1950s onwards, in addition to "Proportions" and "Blind Drawings," he created his first overpaintings, in which monochrome black paint covered almost the entire picture surface. The underlying composition remains recognizable as a structural framework and shapes the form of the overpainting.
In the work offered here, the colorful oil and grease chalk drawing comes to the fore, but a white color field is visible beneath the black overpainting. The untouched edge of the picture leaves room for the painted color surface and creates a particularly exciting relationship through the contrast between black monochrome and light background. At the same time, the chronological sequence of the creative process becomes visible and tangible: the traces of the earlier, now partially concealed chalk drawing remain recognizable and create a fascinating simultaneity of past and present. It shows a painterly, gestural solution to the overpainting, merging darkness and light, surface and movement, monochrome and color into a subtle, dynamic unity. Past and present can be experienced here in an impressive way. [AW]