Arnulf Rainer

Arnulf Rainer's (Baden near Vienna 1929) artistic talent was recognized at an early age at the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt in Traiskirchen, where he produced works inspired by aerial photographs and war images during drawing lessons. When he was forced to draw from nature instead, Rainer left the school in 1944. In 1945, he fled to Carinthia from the Russian occupying forces and encountered international contemporary art for the first time through a British Council exhibition in Klagenfurt. Although he passed the entrance exams to both the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 1948, Rainer dropped out of both institutions immediately after starting. In the early 1950s he founded the Hundsgruppe [Dog Group] with Wolfgang Hollegha, Josef Mikl, Arik Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, and Anton Lehmden, but it disbanded after only one exhibition. Together with Maria Lassnig, Rainer traveled to Paris, where he discovered Informel for himself and subsequently turned away from his figurative, surrealist and fantastic beginnings. Back in Austria, Rainer - along with Markus Prachensky, Wolfgang Hollegha and Josef Mikl - became a co-founder of the legendary artists’ group St. Stephan surrounding Monsignor Otto Mauer. At the same time, he began to work with on his Reductions and Overpaintings that would characterize his work until the mid-1960s. Rainer experimented with drawings in states of intoxication and dealt intensively with the painting of the mentally ill. Film and photography - including the Grimassenbilder [grimace pictures] - as well as finger and foot painting expand Rainer's artistic repertoire. His tireless search for new ways of painting and the constant development of his artistic practice make Arnulf Rainer one of the most influential Austrian artists of the present day. Rainer is the recipient of the Austrian State Prize for Graphic Arts (1966), the Grand Austrian State Prize (1978), and the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art 1st Class (2015), representative of Austria at the Venice Biennale (1978), and multiple documenta participant. In honor of the artist, the Arnulf Rainer Museum was opened in 2009 in the Frauenbad in Baden near Vienna.