ARNULF RAINER
Baden (Austria), 1929  
He developed a fondness for watercolours at an early age, and in the late forties his contact with Surrealism and the work of Bacon, Burra and the American Abstract Expressionists conditioned his attitude to the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst and the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, which he left shortly after starting, in a reaction similar to his attitude to the Hundsgruppe (Dog Group), which he left after their first group exhibition in 1951, a year after he had joined. Without abandoning automatism and a Surrealist style of aesthetics, he embarked on a prolific output of drawings of organic forms that established an interplay of contrasts in which ink and marks gradually took over from support and ground. The tendency to monochrome in series such as Optische Dezentralisationen (Optical Decentralisations), Bildzeichnungen (Blind Drawings) and Zentralisationen (Central Configurations) gave way in 1954 to his most recognisable style, that of the Übermalungen (Overpaintings), in which paintings made by him and other artists were covered with layers of black paint. In 1964 he began to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs. That year also marked the start of his interventions on illustrated books, which acquired increasing importance.
Although his first works with photographs –Photoposen (Photo Poses)- were produced in 1953, in 1968 he began to make general use of them as a basis for his drawings and overpaintings, which became increasingly dense, but fundamentally as a way of experimenting with body language, which became one of his central themes. Facial expressions and gestures constituted the iconographic corpus of his Selbstporträts (Self-portraits), begun in 1969, in which he accentuated certain expressions by means of lines and strokes. Similarly, hands and fingers constituted the explicit repertoire of his gestural painting from 1973 onwards. During this period his work began to achieve recognition after his first retrospective at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and his participation in the Bienal de São Paulo. In the late seventies he incorporated death masks, mummies and faces of corpses, which he exhibited in the Biennale di Venezia in 1978, and religious themes (crosses, the figure of Christ). These two facets provided the central focus in his first exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1984, two years before his first travelling exhibition in the United States. After the retrospective held by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1989, in the nineties he developed new themes in his work, particularly his Images for the Sky, in which he incorporated small objects on his canvases.