RAINER, ARNULF

Arnulf Rainer

Arnulf Rainer (* December 8, 1929, Baden near Vienna, Austria) is a contemporary painter who became famous through its overpainting

From 1940 to 1944, Rainer visited the National Educational Institution in Traiskirchen. He left the school because he was forced by a art educator to draw the nature.

In 1947 he was admitted to the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, which he left after only one day because of an artistic controversy with the assistant Rudolf Korunka. Shortly after, he applied to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, but also left this class three days after his entrance examination, since his work was described as degenerate.

In 1950 he co-founded the dog group, with which he exhibited in 1951 for the first and only time.

In 1953 he met the Catholic priest Otto Mauer in Vienna, who a year later founded the gallery next to St. Stephan, with whom he decisively promoted the Austrian avant-garde. In November 1955 Mauer opened Rainer’s first solo exhibition at the St. Stephan Gallery.
In 1956 he founded the painting group “Galerie St. Stephan”.

In the years 1953 to 1959 Rainer lived retired in a miserable, abandoned villa of his parents in Gainfarn near Bad Vöslau, 25 km south of Vienna.

In September 1959 he founded the “Pintorarium” with Ernst Fuchs and Friedensreich Hundertwasser as a “creatorium for the cremation of the academy”. The pintorarium remained until 1968.

In 1961, Arnulf Rainer was judicially condemned in Wolfsburg because of the public overpainting of a awarded artwork.

From 1963 he worked in different studios in West Berlin, Munich and Cologne.

In 1980, Rainer acquired his studio in Upper Austria and Bavaria and in 1981 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

In September 2009, the Arnulf Rainer Museum was opened in Baden near Vienna.

Most of the year, Arnulf Rainer lives and works now in Enzenkirchen. He transformed a part of a farm into a studio for his work. In winter he works in Tenerife.

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