Arnulf Rainer, the Austrian artist whose relentless drive for experimentation made him a key figure of Europe’s postwar scene, died on December 18 at 96 at his home in Austria. His death was confirmed by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac.
Born in Baden, Austria, in 1929, Rainer spent more than seven decades searching for new modes of expression, producing a body of abstract work that is most closely associated with the Art Informel movement.
He is best known for his Übermalungen (“overpaintings”), a technique he began in 1952 in which he layered dense strokes of pigment over existing images—at first his own images, and, from 1953 onward, those of other artists such as Italian painter Emilio Vedova. Rainer’s resulting works, seemingly at once destructive and devotional, turned painting into a site of erasure, accumulation, and spiritual immersion.
“The organic act of creating is perhaps more essential than the completed painting,” he once said, likening the process to a contemplative ritual.
Across the 1950s and ’60s, Rainer turned his painterly attention to the body and self. His “blind drawings,” as well as the “Face Farces” and “Body Poses” series featured overpainted photographic self-portraits whose gestural marks complicated the artist’s presentation of his own psyche. Though not a Viennese Actionist, he exerted a catalytic influence on the movement’s early years.
Rainer’s engagement with postwar trauma also shaped his work. His 1951 photographic portfolio “Perspectives of Destruction” listed the catastrophic losses of the recent past—Hiroshima, the Holocaust, war and wreckage—and his subsequent layers of black, matte, and glossy paint became what art historian Helmut Friedel described as a “painterly skin in which history is safely stored.” Rainer later adapted this approach to enlarged photo-booth self-portraits, attacking the surface with paint applied by hand, producing hybrid images that fused representation with abstraction.
By the late 1960s and ’70s, major institutions had begun to recognize his importance. He received an early survey in 1968 at the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (now called Mumok) in Austria; participated in the 1972, 1977, and 1982 editions of Documenta in Kassel, Germany; and gained international prominence after exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern and the Lenbachhaus Munich in 1977.
He represented Austria at the 1978 Venice Biennale, the same year he received the Grand Austrian State Prize. In the 1980s, he continued to have major exhibitions at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Abbazia di San Gregorio in Venice, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He also taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1981 to 1995.
His work is included in dozens of major museum collections in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. In 2009, the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in Baden, which celebrated his 95th birthday with a monographic exhibition in 2024.
“An artist makes the past his own and adds something new,” art historian Rudi H. Fuchs once wrote of the artist whom he included in Documenta 7. Rainer’s dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who worked with the artist for more than four decades, called him “a true innovator,” adding: “He never stopped pushing the boundaries of what art could be and how it could be created.”
Art critic Donald Kuspit perhaps put it best: in Rainer’s hands, gesture regained not only its raw energy but its “significance as an indicator of inner mystery.”
