Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer, a central figure of postwar European abstraction best known for his radical “overpaintings,” has died at the age of 96. He passed away on a Thursday in Upper Austria, shortly after his 96th birthday, according to reports from Austria’s APA news agency and statements from his family.
Early life and training
Rainer was born on December 8, 1929, in Baden, near Vienna, and came of age in the devastated cultural landscape that followed the Second World War. Largely self-taught, he briefly attended the University of Applied Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but left both institutions after only a few days in open rejection of academic conventions.
In 1950, he co‑founded the Hundsgruppe (“dog group”), an informal association of young avant‑garde artists that included Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Josef Mikl, Anton Lehmden, and Wolfgang Hollegha, marking his early alignment with nonconformist positions in the Austrian art scene. These circles would feed into the later Gruppe St. Stephan, with which Rainer was associated from the mid‑1950s and which helped define Vienna’s new postwar artistic identity.
Development of ‘overpaintings’
After an early engagement with Surrealism and Art Informel, Rainer turned in the 1950s to what he called “overpainting,” the practice that would define his mature work. In this method, he layered dense, gestural marks of paint, charcoal, or ink over existing images—ranging from his own photographs and self‑portraits to reproductions of old master paintings—partially veiling and simultaneously reanimating the underlying picture.
The overpaintings encompassed several recurring series, including facial “grimaces,” hand and finger paintings, death masks, and works that engaged explicitly with themes of war, religion, and mortality, such as the “Hiroshima” cycle and “stigmatized” Christ images. Rainer described the procedure less as destruction than as intensification, insisting that overpainting was a way to make something from the past “more alive” in the present rather than to negate it.
Recognition and institutional presence
By the 1960s and 1970s, Rainer had become one of Austria’s most prominent and contentious abstract artists, often cited as a pioneer of Art Informel in his home country. He received the Austrian State Prize for Graphic Art in 1966 and the Great Austrian State Prize for Fine Art in 1978, consolidating his status within the national canon while maintaining a reputation for formal aggression and psychological intensity.
Rainer’s work was presented in major international institutions, and he represented Austria at the Venice Biennale, helping to project a postwar Austrian artistic identity beyond its borders. In 2009, the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in his hometown of Baden, underscoring his position as a key figure in the country’s cultural history.
Later career and legacy
From the 1960s onward, Rainer expanded his practice into photography, film, and performance‑related imagery, producing series of grimace photographs and body‑based works that he then reworked through overpainting. His oeuvre also reflects periods of intense engagement with themes of insanity, altered states, and spiritual experience, informed in part by visits to psychiatric institutions and experiments with drugs during the 1960s.
Across more than seven decades, Rainer’s insistence on masking, obliteration, and excess turned the act of painting into a confrontation with history and trauma, a stance that influenced generations of Austrian and European artists.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
