Rainer und die Frauen

Arnulf Rainer's portraits of women

When the Albertina in Vienna dedicates a retrospective to Arnulf Rainer's 85th birthday in a year's time, it will certainly be a brilliant retrospective of a multifaceted oeuvre. However, the Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Gallery in Innsbruck has already organised an exhibition and is publishing a catalogue with an anthology of Rainer's work, the like of which has rarely been assembled and exhibited before. These are overpaintings of photographs from the 1960s to the present day with erotic, sometimes even pornographic motifs. In these works, Arnulf Rainer seems to react very emotionally to the women's bodies; he crosses out, heightens, caricatures, accentuates and sometimes violates the surfaces into which he literally digs his contribution. Sometimes it seems as if he wants to work his way through the photographic layer to his partners. "The process of this confrontation takes on - and this anthology shows this very well - very different forms of engagement. It changes from elegant lineament, a tactile drawing that encompasses and captures the body, to painterly reworking, whereby the flowing and splashing of colour certainly evokes associations with sexual processes, and sometimes the photographic work is completely drowned in colour," writes Peter Weiermair in his introductory text. Andrea Madesta, the second author of the volume, on the other hand, sometimes takes a critical look at the image of women as we encounter it in Arnulf Rainer's work and the historically determined radical confrontation with values and conventions.

Exhibition:
Gallery Elisabeth & Klaus Thoma Innsbruck, 4/10/2013 - 18/1/2014