(born in Baden near Vienna 1929)
Untitled, overpainting, signed and dated A. Rainer 60/61 on the turnover, oil on canvas, 49.5 x 69.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Klewan, Munich - acquired in the 80s
Private Collection, Vienna

Apocalyptic optics and Grundmalerei [underpainting]: These days, there is barely anything left to do other than to demonstrate the death and the end of this world, to jot down the signature of the end. The sun will turn black, nothing will be left for us but to fall down, to burrow deep and to wait.

Arnulf Rainer from:
“Aller Anfang ist schwer” / “the beginning is always the hardest”, DuMont, 2009

From overpainting to repainting

Text on a (significantly) unrealised book project

When I started to paint over my own pictures in 1952 (from 1953 onwards, I also painted over other people’s), I didn’t have the answers to the questions of why, what for, how long. It was only slowly, as the years went by, that closed-off black surfaces or bundles of lines developed, in which I recognised myself, immersing myself and representing myself in them.

I am still amending these images today, continuing to reach a complete blackout, although I have long forgotten what was underneath. My favourite thing is to work on the overpainting of an overpainting. I never wanted to destroy them, I wanted to perfect them.

I needed a certain positive contact with the revised form of the image.

I carry out my artistic work primarily, albeit not exclusively, as a soliloquy. Just as dreams continue into deep sleep, for example, the overpainting sees this self-talk develop into silence. This silence is communicable: otherwise, other people would not snatch from me first and foremost those pictures which I create out of pure self-communication and which I hope, one day, to be able to guide to the expression of complete peace, precisely that same deep sleep or prenatal security or eternal peace or whatever it is called.

Arnulf Rainer 1973 from:
Arnulf Rainer. Schriften. Selbstzeugnisse und ausgewählte Interviews, Hatje Constz Verlag, 2010