LONDON.- Thaddaeus Ropac announced the passing of Arnulf Rainer, who established himself as one of the most influential artists of the post-war period. Surrounded by his family, he died peacefully on December 18th at the age of 96.

For him, Rainer once said, art history is not a history in which one style replaces another. For him, art has a cumulative quality; what he has painted will remain a part of his knowledge. An artist makes the past his own and adds something new. — Rudi H. Fuchs, art historian and curator

Born in Baden, Austria in 1929, Arnulf Rainer ceaselessly searched for new means of expression throughout his lifetime. The artist garnered international critical acclaim with his ‘overpaintings’, a groundbreaking typology of work he commenced in 1952 and pursued throughout his career. Painting over existing artworks – both his own and, from 1953, that of others such as Emilio Vedova (1919–2006) – the artist created densely textured abstract works that play with notions of creation and destruction in a paradoxical homage to the original. The process itself was of paramount importance to the artist, akin to a visual form of spiritual consciousness: ‘The organic act of creating is perhaps more essential than the completed painting; for this progressive participation in the obscuration or immersion of the painting, its gradual return to peace and invisibility […] could be compared to the contemplative experience of religious life.’

In the early 1950s, Rainer first explored the extremes of facial expressions and body language in experiments such as ‘blind drawing,’ which he later developed further in his Face Farces and Body Poses: these photographic self-portraits were often overpainted with gestural strokes that emphasise their frenetic expressivity. In the 1960s, he came into contact with Viennese Actionism and played a catalytic role in the movement without ever being an Actionist himself.

In 1951, Arnulf Rainer titled a portfolio of photographs Perspectives of Destruction. It contained a list of losses from the recent past: the Holocaust and Hiroshima, war and wreckage, and the resulting anguish. The young painter responded to these losses with a painterly process, subjecting his pictures to layer upon layer of paint, covering the previous images and revealing to us, in these overpaintings, black, matt-gloss paintings, a painterly skin in which history is safely stored.

We recall another revolutionary pictorial process in Rainer’s work when, at the end of the 1960s, he developed a new concept for photographic self-portraits, taken in photo booths and enlarged. He processes the black-and-white, representational photographic template with his painterly means of expression. The paint with which he attacks each image is beaten into the painting surface by hand, rubbed in and broken up. This results in a unique fusion of an image with the painterly expressive possibilities of abstraction.

From these pillars of his work, Arnulf Rainer was able to develop a wealth of pictorial solutions throughout his life, also producing delicate, fluid images that always bear his unmistakable signature. — Helmut Friedel, art historian and former director of the Lenbachhaus in Munich

In 1968, the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Wien organised one of the first retrospectives of his work. He participated in documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1977, and 1982, consolidating his position within the international avant-garde. Exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern and the Lenbachhaus Munich (both in 1977) marked his breakthrough. In the wake of his inclusion in the 1978 Venice Biennale and concomitant award of the Grand Austrian State Prize, Rainer’s international reputation flourished during the 1980s, with important solo exhibitions at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1980); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1984); Abbazia di San Gregorio, Venice (1986); a Self Portraits show that travelled across the United States (1986); and a major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1989). He was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1981–95) and became a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin in 1981.

His work was also featured in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 and Avant-Garde in the Eighties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1986–87), as well as entering the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1993, the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in New York, exhibiting over one hundred and fifty of the artist’s works over a two-year period. In 2002, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich dedicated a room to the artist, where his work is on permanent display.

Arnulf Rainer was a true innovator. Besides casting a profound light on the post-war European mentality, he never stopped pushing the boundaries of what art could be and how it could be created. He was among the most inspiring artists I have ever worked with, and his artistic discoveries will be enduring. It was an honor to have known him for over 40 years and to have shown some of his most important works in numerous exhibitions. — Thaddaeus Ropac

More recently, his work has been the subject of retrospectives at international institutions, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2000); Kunstmuseum Den Haag (2005); Alte Pinakothek, Munich (2010); ALBERTINA, Vienna (2014 and 2019–20); Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2017); and MARe – Muzeul de Artă Recentă, Bucharest (2022). In honour of the artist’s 95th birthday in 2024, a major monographic exhibition was held at the Arnulf Rainer Museum, which was established in his native Baden in 2009.

Rainer restores to gesture not only its raw energy – its uninhibited presence – but its significance as an indicator of inner mystery: the mystery of interiority itself. — Donald Kuspit, art critic and poet