Arnulf Rainer

Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna
Through April 1

This retrospective of Arnulf Rainer’s work follows those organized last year at the Neu Galerie der Stadt in Linz and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. A wide selection of the Austrian artist’s works—over one hundred sixty, from both public and private collections—are presented. Thanks to its careful chronology, the show retraces all of the creative phases in Rainer’s career, one that has served as a source of inspiration for generations of artists.

The artist’s work does not develop along a linear path “in continual evolution,” but ranges freely back and forth, creating new, unpredictable trajectories in painting. Having discarded the notion of following some preconceived ideology, Rainer, like a modern-day Parsifal, continues to pursue his own personal mythology, based on a few, very well-defined precepts: the quest (doomed to failure) for perfection, the fusion of art and life, the discovery of another identity; all of this within an almost religious and mystical framework.

In the early Fifties, after the artist discovered the theories of surrealism and psychoanalysis—during which he created a series of “Blind Paintings,” unconscious compositions with his eyes closed—Rainer succeeded in translating his own ideas into a important painted series. These Übermalungen were monochrome over paintings of his own paintings, or those of other artists, in which his object was to erase the very painting he was working on. The exhibition provides worthwhile examples, both of this latter type as well as of the series of works that followed, allowing the visitor to get thoroughly acquainted with the work of this Viennese painter.

Also displayed are several self-portraits done while the artist was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs at the beginning of the Sixties. These Automatenphotos are unconsciously redrawn and painted photographs that, aiming to explore the effects of certain mental illnesses on the physiognomy, align his work as closely to German expressionism as to Viennese actionism, of which Rainer was one of the most important proponents. Works from after 1973 show the artist delving deeply into the theme of body art—painting, for example, with hands, fingers, toes, and feet, or writing on death masks.

The high point of the exhibit is the series of huge black paintings in the central hall of the gallery, which transform the space into a majestic crypt.




Stefano Gualdi
Translation by Jacqueline Smith