Biography

1929
Arnulf Rainer is born in Baden bei Wien on December 8th and grows up in the town of Berndorf bei Baden.

1940 – 44
He attends the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt (a reform school affiliated with the National Socialist Party) in Traiskirchen,
Lower Austria. School art lessons deal mainly with war themes. Rainer draws cartographic landscapes inspired by aerial photography
and dotted with bomb craters, fires, tanks und airplanes; he avoids figures and portraits.

1944
He leaves school after a new art teacher pressures him to draw from nature, deciding to instead simply become an artist.
He briefly attends the Baden Realgymnasium. In 1945 he flees Russian occupying forces by bicycle, taking refuge with relatives
in Carinthia.

1945 – 47
He draws a series of Carinthian landscapes uninhabited by human figures.

1947 – 49
Rainer graduates with a degree from the Staatsgewerbeschule, a structural engineering school in Villach. He had intended to pursue
a career in architecture, but later claims that the school “was so bad that I lost all interest.” At this time, he mostly draws and paints
on paper.
At a British Council exhibition in Klagenfurt, Rainer discovers contemporary international art: Paul Nash, Francis Bacon,
Stanley Spencer, Henry Moore. He begins to draw faces and people.
In 1948 he becomes familiar with Surrealism, whose central belief in the creative power of the unconscious and the non-rational
significantly shapes his self-understanding as an artist. The notion of free-form fantasy appeals to him after the dictatorial indoctrination
in the National Socialist reform school.

1948
Rainer absorbs himself in the surrealist revolutionary theories that will strongly influence his work. He intensifies contact with writers
Michael Guttenbrunner and Max Hölzer in Klagenfurt; at the same time he begins what will be a lifetime friendship and artistic
relationship with 28-year-old painter Maria Lassnig. She helps him get his first show in a Villach bookstore;
together they find out all they can about international artistic movements by reading various English-language newspapers in the information centers the Allies have established throughout the country. Herbert Boeckl is the only Austrian artist who interests them;
through Lassnig, Rainer becomes more familiar with Boeckl’s work.

1949
Despite little enthusiasm for structural engineering, Rainer graduates with good grades from the Staatsgewerbeschule Villach.
He subsequently passes the entrance examination in graphics at the Akademie für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, but leaves the
class on his first day after an artistic disagreement with the professorial assistant Korunka.
Shortly thereafter, he applies to the painting department at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, but quits just three days
after passing the entrance exam when colleagues label his art “degenerate.” For years afterward he refuses to enter the building.

1950
During the early 1950s, a post-surrealistic style becomes popular in Vienna. Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner and
Anton Lehmden represent the “Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.”
The Vienna Fantastic Realists’ pictures are reminiscent of old masters’, including their sharp contours, multiple glazes, and obsession
with detail. Many late surrealists are also members of the “Art Club,” a group that had been founded three years earlier by artists and
art historians. Rainer travels back and forth between St. Georgen, Klagenfurt, and Vienna. In April, Max Hölzer and Edgar Jené
publish the first Surrealist Publications. Influenced by their writings as well as by prevailing fantastic tendencies, Rainer creates
intensely dense surreal drawings, but grows increasingly resistant to the “Art Club” aesthetic.
He founds a separate group with Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehmden, Arik Brauer, Wolfgang Hollegha und Josef Mikl called the
“Hundsgruppe.” Rainer’s contribution to the first (and only) Hundsgruppe exhibition is the graphic portfolio “Cave Canem,”
featuring his earliest use of transparent drawing material.

1950 – 51
That winter, Rainer lives in Ottakring, Vienna’s 16th district. He produces his first hyper-drawing “Ozean, Ozean” from
within his small, dark room.

1951
In March, the Hundsgruppe show opens in the Wiener Gesellschaft für Wissenschaft und Kunst. Despite the presence of abstract
works by Mikl and Hollegha, the exhibition is dominated by surrealist and phantasmagoric pieces – Rainer hasn not yet fully distanced
himself from Surrealism. The opening is an outright art scandal: Rainer, who at that time calls himself “Trrr”– meant to evoke a
dog’s growl – spontaneously starts to insult the audience during Ernst Fuchs’s opening speech. Climbing up a ladder, he shouts,
“I spit on you all – you with your rotten conception of art!” It is the official beginning of Tachisme in Vienna.)
After the exhibition, Rainer turns away from the fantastic and begins his first attempts to work with closed eyes (the blind paintings).
He writes, “In 1951, at 20 years old, I first began to draw with closed eyes. My belief in art up to then had dissolved; I was in crisis,
back to square one. I didn’t know how, what, where to, why. I needed to do something totally new, something that had never been
done before. Coming from surrealism, I was interested in the ideology of psychic automatism. So I decided to close my eyes and
discover something new, something un conscious.”
In the summer, Rainer and Lassnig travel to Paris to visit André Breton, who greatly disappoints their expectations. By contrast, they
are deeply impressed by the “other,” new art that Michel Tapié launches with the exhibition Véhemences Confrontées at Galerie
Nina Dausset: l’art informel. The exhibition presents pieces by Bryen, Capogrossi, de Kooning, Hartung, Mathieu, Pollock, Riopelle,
Russell und Wols. Moved above all by the work of Wols and Hartung, Rainer decisively turns away from the surrealistic-figurative,
instead producing abstract images he calls “microstructures” and “atomizations.” These compositions feature finely felted textures
and graphic frizz woven organically into each other, as well as surfaces that lack clear center points.
After their return from Paris, Rainer and Lassnig organize an exhibition of young non-figurative art at the Kärntner Kunstverein. Rainer
contributes his “atomarer Malerei, Blindmalerei, expression élémentaire” (atomic painting, blind painting, elemental expression).
Under the pseudonym Zuzlu, he debuts so-called “nada painting,” empty frames hanging on the walls. The photographic portfolio
“Perspectives of Destruction” (later published with Wolfgang Kudrofsky) becomes the résumé of these new dissolutions of form and
micro-morphologies.

1952
After microstructures, Rainer moves on to “centralizations,” “central and vertical designs” – minimalist images composed of just a few
strokes. Pictures are painted onto burlap and over older images that he purchases at auctions. Lacking material, Rainer performs
his first illicit overpaintings on other artists’ images, signing them “TRRR.”
In February, he presents his newest works at Galerie Kleinmayr in Klagenfurt. In March, he has a solo exhibition at Zimmergalerie
Franck in Frankfurt am Main. The Franck show is today considered the first manifestation of the Informal in Central Europe; its catalog features Rainer’s manifestos, “Malerei um die Malerei zu verlassen” (Painting in Order to Leave Painting) and
“Das Eine gegen das Andere” (One Versus the Other).
He travels to Paris a second time.

1953 – 59
Rainer lives ascetically in his parents’ abandoned, unfurnished villa in Gainfarn, near Bad Vöslau, Lower Austria. Here he begins
his “reductions,” a group of starkly monochrome black pictures with linear, geometrically-delineated white sections. These works,
along with the “Grundmalerei” series – monochromatic, mostly black pictures with velvety surfaces reminiscent of primed canvas –
are considered precursors to overpainting.
In 1953, he meets the Viennese preacher Monsignore Otto Mauer, who will become a key figure in Rainer’s artistic development.
One year later, Otto Mauer founds the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, thus providing a critical venue for the Austrian avant-garde.

1953 – 54
Rainer is preoccupied with concerns of proportion, which he explores in his “Proportion Studies”: “In the spring of 1953
I decided to take what seemed at the time a dialectical step: I attempted a type of painting that was based solely on
proportions of hue weights, flat surfaces and volume fissions. It originated in the Farbkollagen (color collages) shown here,
which I manufactured through parallel transfer of colored papers through balance tests. Due to technical reasons,
the colored papers lay horizontally, so that to this day it is difficult for me to determine up from down, right from left.
These Farbproportionierungen [color proportionings] inspired around
100 oil paintings and 30 sculptures that I later destroyed almost entirely in a fit of despair (compounded by insoluble storage,
maintenance, and shelving problems) after they were exhibited with great failure in the Vienna Galerie Würthle in fall of 1954.”

1954
The Galerie nächst St. Stephan becomes the stomping ground of the younger generation and, under the sponsorship of
Monsignore Otto Mauer, a safe haven in conservative Vienna for Tachisme’s abstract lyricism.
Rainer produces overpaintings with increasing frequency: painted central forms worked over so often that the original image
becomes obliterated by a black surface. Rainer describes this phase: “At that time, I found myself … desiring metamorphosis, in
part through contrary approaches to image. After [destroying] the proportion studies, in 1954/55 I decided to take up once more
my gesticulative-expressive concept of 1951/52. However, I wasn’t as successful as I had originally been. In my dissatisfaction
I corrected the paintings constantly, until they became darker and darker. That is how, without any grand ideas, the
overpaintings began.”
From here on (until around 1965), Rainer concentrates mainly on this genre, experimenting with various formats: sometimes with
round images, but increasingly incorporating a cross form. He chooses the cross in part because it refers to his intense interest
in mystical content, but the stark, symbolic form also conveys the tension between a form and its expressionistic treatment.
Along with overpaintings, Rainer begins his first photo poses, anticipating – as in the blind drawings – his later interest in body
language. He will later overpaint some of these staged photo booth self-portraits.

1955
Rainer’s first solo exhibition in Galerie St. Stephan.
Near the end of the year, the St. Stephan group gathers at the shared studio of Prachensky and Hollegha in Vienna’s
Liechtensteinstrasse. Prachensky, Hollegha, Mikl und Rainer agree that, in order to meet their rigorous standards, Galerie
nächst St. Stephan should be devoted exclusively to their work. Unfortunately, this decree has little effect; the group begins
to dissolve soon afterward.

1956 – 57
Crucifixion series: Rainer assembles 15 various-sized crosses and paints over them.
Along with three colleagues from the Gruppe St. Stephan, Hollegha, Mikl und Prachensky, he develops the exhibition
Monochrome Komplexe (Schwarzmalerei, Blauserie und Rotbilder) for the Wiener Sezession.
In the so-called “Bildverbrennungsaktion” (picture-burning action) in 1957, he destroys some proportion collages as well as
other early works in his Gainfarn studio.

1958
Rainer produces “Monochrome Gründen” (Monochrome Reasons) and NNN-Malerei.
He gives a lecture, 10 Theses toward a Progressive Art on January 11th in the Galerie nächst St. Stefan and with Prachensky
co-authors the manifesto Architecture with Hands.

1958 – 63
Sam Francis, Georges Mathieu, Emilio Vedova, Viktor Vasarely und many other artists permit Rainer to overpaint their work.

1959
Rainer obtains a larger studio in the Wollzeile 36 in Vienna’s first district. On September 17th he founds with painters Ernst Fuchs and
Friedensreich Hundertwasser the “Pintatorium,” a “Creatorium for the Cremation of the Academy” Its manifesto pamphlet reads:
“In order to rescue the center of today’s culture – painting – from the castration of the academy, it is necessary to contaminate the youth
with an imagination, with the notion of a center, a cave, a haven in which creative life has enough light and air to flourish. This imagination
will give them enough strength to boycott our art schools and to leave, because every form of schooling ends here today.”
The Pintatorium exists until 1968, when union police disband it.
Filmmaker Peter Kubelka begins to shoot the film “Arnulf Rainer,” composed solely of white and black images.

1960
Rainer takes part in the “Monochrome Malerei” exhibition (featuring, among others, Fontana, Manzoni, Klein, Rothko, Geiger,
and Girke) in Leverkusen. The series “Stämme” arises as a continuation of the vertical designs of 1952.

1961
Rainer is sentenced in a Wolfsburg court after publicly overpainting a prize-winning picture. At the opening of the exhibition
“Junge Stadt sieht junge Kunst” (A Young City Sees Young Art) he purposely over-paints another award-winning work,
“Mond und Figuren II” by the Schoeppenstadt graphic artist Helga Pape, stapling to the picture a card printed, “Overpainted by
Arnulf Rainer.” The press reports: “Quickly summoned, the police arrested the ‘black-outer,’ interrogated him and temporarily jailed
him. The Hildesheim state advocate’s office has now filed charges for ‘deliberately damaging an art object that had been publicly
displayed by smearing an engraving in the exhibition “Junge Stadt sieht junge Kunst” with black paint – punishable by order
§ 304 STGB. The fine awaiting the Viennese art fanatic is, as we understand, considerable.”

1962
Rainer is invited to exhibitions in Düsseldorf (Galerie Schmela), Karlsruhe (Galerie Rottloff), and Tokyo. He participates in the
Graphic Biennale in Milan und in the Comparaisons exhibition in the Musée National d’art moderne in Paris.

1963
Rainer obtains a second studio in West Berlin that he keeps until 1967.
In the fall he produces “Haute Coiffure,” a portfolio of 10 dry-point etchings.
He begins to collect drawings by mentally disturbed artists.

1964 – 65
Rainer begins to experiment with drawing under the influence of alcohol and drugs. His preoccupation with altered perception and
with the work of mentally ill artists steers his style in a hallucinatory, frenetic direction. He begins to refer unconsciously to his own
figurative, surrealistic beginnings, creating starkly colored overpaintings, explosions, comet trails and arches. Rainer resumes
drawing on transparent Ultraphan foils, maintaining his print/graphic aesthetic.

1966
Rainer’s new works are exhibited at Galerie Peithner-Lichtenfels in Vienna. He receives the Austrian state prize for graphic art.
In Lausanne, France, doctors at the university clinic film him drawing under the influence of psilocybin.

1967
Rainer acquires an even larger studio on Mariahilfer Strasse 49 in Vienna’s sixth district, where he produces his new
“Hyperzeichnungen” (hyper-drawings). His own publishing house, based in Vienna and Berlin, releases the Wahnhall portfolio.
During a television interview, Rainer vows to paint portraits of the world’s 65,000 most important historical personalities.
At the opening of a Pintorarium exhibition in Munich, Rainer performs his first body painting by drawing a large black vertical line
along a nude woman’s back.
At the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich, he is observed working under the influence of LSD.

1968
In Vienna that February, Rainer presents his first visual self portrait: he paints his face and hands black.
The Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna organizes a large retrospective of his work.

1958 – 63
Sam Francis, Georges Mathieu, Emilio Vedova, Viktor Vasarely und many other artists permit Rainer to overpaint their work.

1969
Rainer exhibits in Cologne, Innsbruck, Bremen, Linz, Munich, and Berlin.
He produces grimace photos with and without face-paint (taken either in photo booths or by a photographer) that he then
overpaints. The grimaces and contorted poses of the mentally ill present Rainer with an abundance of expressive potential.
He writes, “The faces that I drew earlier all had impossible wrinkles, false furrows, invented accentuations. These were missing
from the photographs.
When I finally brushed them onto the cheeks and went for a walk, I felt like a new man … When I began to draw over the photos of
my mimicked farces, I discovered something surprising: All kinds of new, unknown people lurked within me, but my muscles alone
weren’t able to reveal them.”
Rainer hereby creates a mixed medium somewhere between the visual and the theatrical (reminiscent of earlier actions:
insulting his exhibition audience in 1951, the Wolfsburg affair, experimentation with drugs and alcohol, collaboration with
Peter Kubelka, etc.) and moves closer to Vienna Actionists Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler,
without ever really belonging to the group. Rainer describes how their artistic approaches began to diverge: “… the Actionists (…)
tried to explicate content that existed only in a latent form through theatrical language and by means of certain processes.
Posture and poses played a subordinate role, while the material and its treatment were more vital, more substantial (…)
For me, the material is actually very secondary and I now work entirely without objects of any kind (…)
For me, it’s simply about physical-corporeal expression.”

1970
Rainer creates countless series of overpainted grimace photos, his “Face Farces.” Because the photos don’t completely
capture the nervous excitement of a grimace, he seeks to exaggerate this by drawing over the images. Later, he includes
expressive whole-body postures: “Hand Poses,” “Knee, Lying, and Sitting Poses,” “Mouthpieces,” “Knee Series,”
“Rubber Band Series,” “Yoga,” etc.
Rainer overpaints and overdraws not only his own gestures and poses, but later photographs of “psychotic” body language as well.
He produces the series “Katatonika” (1972/76), Felsen (Rocks) (1974/76), Höhlen (Caves) (1975/77), Untergrundarchitektur
(Unterground Architecture) (1975/77), „Frauenposen“ (Women Poses) (1977), „Lesbische Frauenliebe“ (Lesbian Love) (1977),
„Totenmasken“ (Death Masks) (1977/78).

1971
Rainer takes part in the exhibition “Anfänge des Informel in Österreich 1949 – 1953” (Beginnings of the Informal in Austria).
The Kunstverein Hamburg exhibits the first large German retrospective of his work. Rainer presents 38 pieces at the
11th Sao Paulo Biennale. He also acquires a studio in Cologne.

1972
Rainer expands his technique to include video and film. He produces a series of strongly self-representational visual recordings, using
frames from these films as the basis for photographic overpainting.
Cross overpaintings and photo overpaintings (Face Farces) are shown at the documenta 5 in Kassel.

1973
Rainer begins working with gestural hand paintings which also include “finger- and foot-paintings.” He writes: “The gestures of
groping, stroking, or hitting may have their concrete activation in video art as touching, slapping, or anointing someone with oil, but
the sheer traces of fingers on a clean white surface make my heart race enough to imagine the hard-edged, white canvas as a lover.
Those traces might be deemed as having painterly qualities.” The first exhibition of these works takes place in 1974 in the
Kunstraum München.
Rainer creates the series “Stirnserie” (Brow Series) and “Mouthpieces.”

1974
The city of Vienna honors Rainer with its art prize. However, he declines to attend the awards ceremony; the prize is subsequently
retracted.
He embarks on a longtime collaboration with Dieter Roth, Misch- und Trennkunst (Mixed and Separate Art). Together they create
videotapes, mixed media works, and the film Verlegenes und Vergebenes (Misplaced and Futile).
Kubelka screens his film, Arnulf Rainer as filmed by Peter Kubelka.

1975
Rainer remains inspired by the work of his colleagues. He produces countless series of “Kunst über Kunst” (Art on Art), overpainting photographs arranged in the style of Gustave Doré, Zanetti, Leonardo, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Vincent Van Gogh, and
many others.
Edition Hundertmark publishes the photographic portfolio “Nervenkramp” (Nerve Cramp).
Rainer must abandon his Cologne studio when the building is scheduled for demolition.

1977
Rainer begins a series of overpaintings inspired by Austrian baroque sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s expressive
“character heads.”
Further works include the cycles “Frauenposen” (Women Poses), “Ekstasen” (Ecstasies), “Lovers,” “Trancen,” (Trances),
“Künstlertiere” (Artists’ Animals), and “Totenmasken” (Death Masks). He participates in documenta 6.

1978
Rainer represents Austria at the Venice Biennale with his Körpersprache-Arbeiten (body language works).
In November, he receives the highest Austrian state prize “in appreciation of his achievemtents in the field of the visual arts.”

1979
Rainer produces the sequences “Nijinski,” “Leichengesichter” (Corpse Faces) und “Nachmalungen (Kopien von
Schimpansenmalereien)” (Copies of Chimpanzee Paintings).
He and Dieter Roth create an action piece, “Expansion,” for the Vienna Biennale for New Art at the Wiener Secession.

1980
Rainer relocates to studios in Upper Austria und Bavaria (Kloster Vornbach near Passau).
A selection of hand- and finger-paintings is shown in the documenta 7.
He returns to religious themes: “Crosses,” “Representations of Christ.”

1981
Rainer is named Professor at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and is initiated to the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

1984
The retrospective “Mort et Sacrifice” opens at the Musée National d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

1986
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York acquires a large Face Farce painting.

1987
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchases one of the newer large crosses.

1989
A wide-ranging retrospective opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and then travels to the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago, to the Historischen Museum of Vienna and in 1990 to the Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the
Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.

1991 –92
Rainer begins work on the Märtyrer- und Katastrophenbildern (Martyr and Catastrophe Portraits) und on the “Engel-Serie” (Angel Series).

1993 – 94
In 1993/94 he produces a series of “Kosmos-Bilder” (Cosmos Images).

1994
Unidentified criminals break into the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and destroy 26 of Rainer’s paintings.
Disheartened by the loss, he decides to retire in 1995.

1996
Kärntner Galerie in Vienna hosts the first exhibition of the Mikrokosmos, Makrokosmos paintings that Rainer has been working on since
1994. He has been using new techniques and fresh materials including corrugated aluminum, cardboard studded with pellet-gun shells or shaped into rootlike forms, geological formations, and star and celestial forms.
Rainer begins working on his Bibelillustrationen (Bible Illustrations).

2000
In honor of Rainer’s 70th birthday, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam und Vienna’s Kunstforum put on concurrent retrospective shows.

2001
The Städtische Galerie in Munich’s Lenbachhaus exhibits Bible Illustrations from the Frieder Burda collection.

2002
The Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich devotes a permanent display to Rainer’s work.

2003
Rainer receives the Rhenus Art Prize for his oeuvre; he is the third recipient, after Baselitz and Polke.
The Museo Correr in Venice exhibits the Canova-Rainer series.
Rainer takes up photography. At first his photographs are studies for overpaintings, but soon they become works in their own right.
Munich’s Galerie Karl Pfefferle exhibits these new pieces, which depict subjects under water or floating just above the surface.

2003 – 04
During the XI. Biennale d’Arte Sacra in Venice, the Museo diocesano di Sant’Apollonia shows a selection of Rainer’s
religious works under the title “Arnulf Rainer – Sotto la Croce.”

2004
The Kunsthalle der Jesuitenkirche in Aschaffenburg devotes an entire exhibition to Rainer.
On June 25th, the Catholic Faculty of the University of Münster presents him with an honorary doctorate.

2005
Private museum la maison rouge, fondation antoine de galbert in Paris exhibits a comparative show of its own Rainer works together
with selections from his collection, arnulf rainer et sa collection d’art brut.
The Sammlung Essl in Klosterneuburg exhibits Rainer alongside Antoni Tàpies, Tàpies – Rainer, Porteurs de Secret.At the same time,
the Armandomuseum in Amersfoort shows “Körpersprache – Landschaftssprache (Body Language – Landscape Language).”

2006
On May 18th, Arnulf Rainer is awarded an honorary Doctorate of Theology from the Catholic-Theological Private University Linz.
The Comunidad de Madrid and the CAAM, Gran Canaria exhibit Arnulf Rainer – Dieter Roth, Mezclarse y Separarse.
On September 29th, Rainer – on the basis of his affinity with Francisco de Goya – is the first non-Spanish artist to receive the
Aragón-Goya Prize for his life’s work. Concurrently the Museo de Zaragoza honors him with an exhibition of Goya overpaintings
from the 1980s and from 2005/2006.
The MAK Vienna present a selection of original poster designs for its exhibition RAINER, sonst keiner! Overwritings.
Longtime collector Frieder Burda displays a group of Bible Overpaintings in his Baden-Baden museum.

2007
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles shows the poster design exhibition under the title Arnulf Rainer. Hyper-Graphics.
Gallery Heike Curtze premiers Rainer’s new work in an exhibition titled Fotos maltrechas/Fehlfotographie (Failed Photography).
In these pieces, the artist adorns his own photographs with graphisms.
The exhibition Arnulf Rainer – Dieter Roth. Misch- und Trennkunst travels to the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg.

2008
Galerie Kovacek in Vienna shows works from the Kanarien (Canaries) series of 2006 – 2007. For its grand re-opening, the
Schiller-Museum in Weimar displays an exhibition on Victor Hugo, presenting a selection from Rainer’s Hugo-Zyklus (Hugo Cycle).
The Belvedere Vienna hosts a show of substantial works from Rainer’s and Roth’s Misch- und Trennkunst in the Orangerie.

2009
Grand opening of the Arnulf Rainer Museum Frauenbad, Baden bei Wien with the exhibition “The Beginning is Always the Hardest.
Early Works 1949 –1961”.