Image: Arnulf Rainer | Sleep, 1973/74 | The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna © Arnulf Rainer
Rainer was born in Baden, near Vienna, in 1929 and passed away in Upper Austria in late 2025. The exhibition therefore concerns an artist whose life extended from a 1929 birth in the region near Vienna to his death in Upper Austria in late 2025.
The selection spans Rainer’s overpaintings, Face Farces, crosses and Veiled Pictures, covering painting, drawing, printmaking, photography and performative work. Its named bodies of work and media range from painted and drawn works to prints, photographs and performative work.
Rainer became known internationally through his radical overpaintings of the 1950s, which helped him occupy an important place in the post-1945 artistic pantheon. Those works testify to his personal stance as an artist, one that defied all conventions. Arnulf Rainer’s ‘Centralization’ is dated 1951.
Rainer left an indelible mark on international art history as an innovator who spent over seven decades probing the outer limits of painting.
