Arnulf Rainer

The rejection suited him. Working through the 1950s at Galerie St. Stephan, the most significant avant-garde gallery in Austria at the time, Rainer developed what he called the Overpaintings: a sustained practice of covering existing images with layers of near-monochromatic paint, applied to works by Sam Francis, Georges Mathieu, Emilio Vedova, and Victor Vasarely, as well as to his own canvases. He described the process as "the passion for gradual shrouding into darkness, the drowning of the image." Between 1954^[3] and 1975 the series grew into one of the most unusual bodies of work in postwar European painting.

In 1968^[3] he began photographing himself in automated photo booths at Vienna's West Railway Station, grimacing for the flash. These images became the basis for the Face Farces series from 1970: photographs of his own facial contortions revised with colour and graphic intervention, linking portraiture to psychotic states. By 1973 he was painting directly with fingers, feet, and hands. Twenty such body-language works appeared at Documenta 7 in 1982, the same year his Hiroshima series toured fifteen European museums.

A major retrospective, Death and Sacrifice, opened at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1984^[3]. MoMA and the Guggenheim began collecting his work shortly after. He was appointed Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1981 and received the Max-Beckmann Prize from the city of Frankfurt that same year.