Arnulf Rainer

Arnulf Rainer

December 8, 2014

An Austrian painter, Arnulf Rainer is the founder of Art Informel in Austria. He is best known for his 'overpaintings', developed in the 1950s.

Born in 1929 in Baden, Austria, Rainer currently lives and works in Vienna. He attended the National Political Institute of Education in Traiskirchen, Lower Austria. During his studies, his paintings were inspired by aerial photography and cartographic landscapes with bomb craters, fires, tanks and aircraft. When his teacher tried to force him to draw from nature, he left the school in 1944 to become an artist. In this period, he was greatly influenced by Surrealism’s revolutionary theories. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe (dog group) together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. In 1978, he received the Grand Austrian State Prize. In the same year, and in 1980, he became the Austrian representative at the Venice Biennale.

Almost entirely self-taught, Rainer merged an interest in Surrealism with the physicality and spontaneity of Art Informel in his early paintings. Over the years he moved towards abstraction and more experimental practices. His practice was characterized by overpainting and reworking, painting over paintings by other artists or photographs of figures or nature, often building up heavy impasto.

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