It’s Day 275 and it’s a hot day so I’m spending much time downstairs in my studio.  I have a lot of work to do today including finishing feedback for my writing group, but I have to say that I had such a fun time doing my self-portrait tribute in honor of Arnulf Rainer today!

Arnulf Rainer (born 8 December 1929, in Baden, Austria), is an Austrian painter and is internationally renowned for his abstract informal art.

In his early years, Rainer was influenced by Surrealism. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe (dog group) together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. After 1954, Rainer’s style evolved towards Destruction of Forms, with blackenings, overpaintings, and maskings of illustrations and photographs dominating his later

work. He was close to the Vienna Actionism, featuring body art and painting under drug influence. He did a lot of work on Hiroshima, after the bombing.

In 1978, he received the Great Austrian National Prize. In the same year, and in 1980, he became the Austrian representative at the Venice Biennale. From 1981 to 1995, Rainer held a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna – the same place where he aborted his own studies after three days, unsatisfied.

His works are shown in the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. As the culmination of the appraisal of his work, in 1993 the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in New York City.

Arnulf Rainer was a member of the Lord Jim Lodge.

Biography is from wikipedia.

Austrian painter, printmaker and photographer. He had almost no academic training as an artist. From 1948 to 1951 he produced Surrealistic drawings representing underwater scenes and mystical forms, rendering these fantastic images in pencil as a densely worked surface. Deeply suspicious of rationality, he investigated the potential of dreams, madness and the subconscious; to these ends he co-founded the Hundsgruppe under the influence of French Surrealism in 1950.

He began to turn away from fantastic Surrealism. From 1951 to 1954 he worked on a series

entitled Blind Drawings (e.g. 1952; see 1988 exh. cat., p. 27), in which he studied optical disintegration and the destruction of form, replacing pictorial composition and illusion with the immediacy of accidentally encountered textures. From 1953 to 1965 he devoted himself principally to a series of Overpaintings, in which he obliterated his early expressive drawings or pictures by friends with whose work he was in sympathy, to produce almost monochrome paintings dominated by black or red.

From 1956 Rainer became concerned with religious theories and practices, particularly in a group of paintings dominated by cruciform shapes. The interest in extreme emotional states hinted at in such works became even more pronounced in 1963, when he began to collect paintings by the insane, and in 1964, when he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs.

From the mid 1970s Rainer reworked photographs on a variety of subjects. Constantly adding to his repertory of images Rainer continued to exploit the interaction of intellectual meditation and bodily expression.

Biography above is from www.tate.org.uk.

I hope you enjoy my piece in tribute to Arnulf Rainer today!  I had fun creating it. 🙂  I will see you tomorrow on Day 276.

Best,

Linda