Arnulf Rainer

His commitment to the search for new pictorial approaches, together with his performative work and extensive written documentation, established Arnulf Rainer as one of the most influential artists of his generation.

Emphasizing the bodily language inherent in the act of painting, Rainer highlighted the earliest forms of human expression and, from the 1970s onward, began photographing himself, creating a link between the theatrical and the graphic as modes of expression. Closely aligned with Viennese Actionism, he explored gesture through performance, expanding his practice to video and developing a mode of painting executed with his hands, which accompanied him throughout his entire career.

Interested in automatism and in the destruction of conventional forms of communication in order to recover the richness of human expression, Rainer grounded his practice in the concealment and overpainting of images by other artists and of self-portraits, moving toward abstraction and the near-total darkening of form. In his constant effort to free himself from his own limitations, he also challenged conventional canvas formats.

In 1978 he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale and participated in several editions of Documenta Kassel. Major institutions such as the Albertina Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Nationalgalerie, the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Kunstverein Hamburg devoted retrospective exhibitions to his work.

His works entered the collections of major institutions including the Stedelijk Museum, MoMA New York, the Ludwig Museum, Tate Britain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, among others.

Arnulf Rainer – Portfolio 2025