Arnulf Rainer, a number one determine of the Austrian avant-garde whose gestural work confronted the atrocities of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and whose unflinching strategy to experimental self-portraiture made him immediately recognisable, has died aged 96; his demise on 18 December was confirmed by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac who described him as one of the crucial influential artists of the post-war interval.
Born in 1929 in Baden, Austria, Rainer got here of age within the aftermath of World Warfare II as a stressed enfant horrible who distanced himself from educational traditions, discovering early kinship with Surrealism and Artwork Informel. Largely self-taught, Rainer gravitated to Vienna within the late Forties, a metropolis the place day by day life unfolded amid rubble, shortage, and the lingering trauma of conflict.
On this surroundings, Rainer’s observe thrived as he turned an important determine within the reawakening of Austrian up to date artwork. He was one of many founding members of Galerie nächst St Stephan, one of many only a few galleries in postwar Vienna which provided an important assembly level for artists looking for alternate options to a conservative artwork world taking part in protected and desperately looking for business viability.
Galerie nächst St Stephan would go on to form generations of Austrian artwork, serving because the launchpad for most of the nation’s most important figures, together with Maria Lassnig. Rainer’s presence there was formative: his radical strategy to portray, rejection of polished surfaces, and insistence on psychological depth helped outline the gallery’s ethos. In Vienna, Rainer cast a group that was small however intellectually ferocious, united by the idea that artwork should sq. as much as the fabric circumstances of historic traumas quite than merely apologise for them.
By the early Fifties, he had begun producing the works that may outline his legacy. In his Übermalungen (overpaintings), Rainer featured painted over images, self-portraits, crosses, faces, and even reproductions of historic works, overlaying them with aggressive gestures, dense black strokes, scratches, and erasures that each hid and intensified the pictures beneath to create a charged ambiance during which the human kind is remodeled, typically by a satirical grotesquerie, and comes near being obliterated altogether. In these works, violence and vulnerability coexist; the floor turns into a file of psychic wrestle, weighed down with the heaviness of historic inheritance.
In 1951, he produced a portfolio of images, Views of Destruction, that referenced Twentieth-century tragedies equivalent to Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Considered one of his most arresting mid-career work, Hiroshima (1982), which addressed its topic by gesture, erasure, and violent mark-making, whereby the canvas itself seems scarred, demonstrated the impossibility of enough illustration of one of many century’s defining catastrophes.
His frequent use of his personal picture, distorted, masked, or partially erased, turned the self-portrait right into a website of existential inquiry quite than self-celebration. “For him, as Rainer as soon as stated, artwork historical past is just not a historical past during which one fashion replaces one other”, stated the Dutch curator Rudi H. Fuchs. “For him, artwork has a cumulative high quality; what he has painted stays a part of his data… An artist appropriates the previous and provides one thing new to it.”
All through his profession, Rainer resisted straightforward categorisation. Although related at varied occasions with Artwork Brut, Summary Expressionism, and Viennese Actionism, he remained fiercely unbiased, sceptical of actions and labels alike. This resistance prolonged to his public persona: reclusive, austere, and infrequently crucial of the artwork world, he nonetheless achieved worldwide recognition.
His work entered main museum collections throughout Europe and the USA, together with the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York and the Artwork Institute of Chicago, and he represented Austria twice on the Venice Biennale (first in 1978, the yr that he acquired the Grand Austrian State Prize, after which once more in 1980), cementing his standing as a central determine in postwar artwork.
Rainer’s significance lies not solely in institutional accolades, however within the enduring urgency of his work. Rainer insisted that artwork confront discomfort, concern, and mortality, quite than soothe or distract, regardless of claiming that “the ideas of my works… are the extinction of expression, everlasting masking and contemplative tranquillity.” He’s survived by his spouse Hannelore, his daughter Clara, and his son-in-law Javier.
Ulrich Rainer, Ohne Titel, round 1989
Picture: Ulrich Ghezzi
