Arnulf Rainer
New Works on Paper
Arnulf Rainer is considered one of the most influential, but also one of the most innovative and provocative artists in Austria. His art is just as complex as it is contradictory. As someone always pushing the limits and as an anti-artist, Rainer has been working since the 1950s on overpaintings. His tireless striving for expansion includes serial work, but also the attempt to block out consciousness in an intensive process of creating.
The new works, created primarily in Tenerife and exhibited now for the first time, are intensely colorful and joyful. They appear delicate or wild, sometimes mad, almost enlightened. For Rainer, the tension between painting ground and overpainting, the probing of light, color, gesture and format is a never-ending artistic challenge. Whereas earlier it was mostly expressive, frequently black pictures full of restlessness and doubt that were the order of the day, the most recent works are comparatively cheerful, delicate, evincing meditative luminosity and imagination.