Rainer und die Frauen

The Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Gallery in Innsbruck already organised an exhibition in 2013, prior to the retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna for Rainer’s 85 birthday, and is issuing a catalogue with an anthology of Rainer’s work of a kind that has rarely been assembled and seen in this form before. These are overpaintings of photographs from the 1960s to the present day with erotic, at times even pornographic motifs. In these works Arnulf Rainer appears to react very emotionally to the female bodies; he strikes through, intensifies, caricatures, accentuates and at times injures the surfaces into which he positively digs his contribution. Sometimes it seems as though he wanted to work his way through the photographic layer towards his partners. “The process of this engagement takes on – and this anthology demonstrates it very well – quite different forms of intervention. It shifts from elegant linework, a tactile drawing that encompasses and grasps the body, to painterly reworking, in which the flowing and spattering of the paint certainly gives rise to associations with sexual processes, and sometimes the photographic work is drowned completely in paint,” writes Peter Weiermair in his introductory text. Andrea Madesta, the volume’s second author, by contrast takes an at times critical view of the image of woman that confronts us in the work of Arnulf Rainer and in its historically conditioned radical engagement with values and conventions.

Exhibition:
Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Gallery, Innsbruck, 4/10/2013 – 18/1/2014