ARNULF RAINER. A Tribute - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

ARNULF RAINER. A Tribute
Arnulf Rainer, probably Austria’s most eminent living contemporary artist, will celebrate his 90th birthday in December.

The current retrospective exhibition at the Albertina is dedicated to him as a tribute, showing a selection of his most important work series.

The exhibition has been curated by Antonia Hoerschelmann, there are works from all phases in Rainer’s oeuvre, up to the most recent period including overpaintings, crucifixions, veiled paintings and self-representations.

Rainer had close ties with Viennese Actionism and its protagonists Otto Mühl, Herbert Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Günter Brus. He later developed his art towards the destruction of form by means of overpainting and blackening pictures and photographs, in the 1970s he pursued gestural hand- and fingerpainting.

The overpaintings and blackenings of the 1950s to 1970s – in the beginnings actually owed to the lack of material – are perhaps his most famous works internationally, they constitute one of the key parts of the exhibition.

From the late 1960s on he used his face and his facial expressions as the subject of performative photographs which he subsequently altered in radical ways.

In these “Face Farces” and “Body Poses” the artist used his own body and face with distorted and extreme postures and grimaces, reminding of the sculptor Messerschmidt’s “Caracter Heads” or the photographs of Jean Martin Charcot’s hysterical patients in the Salpetrière hospital of the 19th century.
The interventions on the photographs are not isolated from the photographic image, they include it, they accentuate it and they make it unfold its full impact, even when the absolute blackness of charcoal dominates on many pictures.
In the 1970s, Rainer applied black, yellow and red strokes, trickles, splashes, color stripes and stains on his own face and body, with dynamic and spontaneous gestures. He also spread the paint on the picture with hands and feet, emphasizing the impulsive immediacy of his intuitive act of painting.

Rainer explores universal themes and works with them, he reflects about them. The grimaces convey melancholy, curiosity, desire.

The crosses and the veiled pictures of the 1980s and 1990s are other highlights of the exhibition that features a total of 40 paintings from the Albertina’s own collection.

In one particular work series the artist experiments with the shape of the cross, uniting the vertical and the horizontal dimensions as a starting point for existential questions.

Exploring and even transcending the boundaries of the body implicates the search for the opposite pole, as the body is limited and exhaustible: It is the inner self, the silence, the economy of resources, the internalization of existence – as evident in his later work cycles. These are precise and accurate testimonies, extremely purist on a formal level, with thoughtful strokes, sober and without any anxiety. In the “veiled pictures” Rainer creates subtly light and color spaces in a flowing visual language and with free brushstrokes. Spatial depth appears to be synchronic with a temporal dimension. The idea of eternity inherent in the pictures seems to expand and to transcend the boundaries of the image, beyond the here and now.

Rainer never remains static. His work always explores the usage of the gaze, not only as an act of seeing or an appropriation of the viewed, but of a gaze that takes a position, a position towards history, towards the origin and towards art as such. (written by Cem Angeli)
The exhibition runs until January 19 2020, daily from 10 am to 6 pm, Wed and Fr until 9 pm.

Albertina Museum | www.albertina.at
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