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Arnulf Rainer is one of the leading artists in Austria. His work alternates between photography and painting. His photographic work should be considered performative photography, similar to that by Valie Export, Ulay, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. He became internationally famous in the fifties for his ‘‘over-painting’’ of already existing paintings and later for his overpainting and over-drawing of photographs. He uses self-portraits and other photographs as the base for his Bildu¨bermalungen (Over-paintings). Expressive, spontaneous, and gestural, his work is important because its cross-disciplinary nature and focus on the body opened the doors to the innovations by many later artists. Arnulf Rainer was born on December 8, 1929 in

Baden (near Vienna), Austria. In 1948, he discovered Surrealism and until 1951 worked with Fantastic Realism style producing Surrealist-figurative work. Except for attending two Viennese art schools for very brief periods in 1949, he was basically self-taught. Since the early fifties, along with painting, photography has played an important role in Rainer’s work, starting with the pub-

lication of the photography portfolio Perspektiven der Vernichtung (Perspectives of Destruction) in 1951. Rainer’s interest in religion has made it a frequent theme for his art since 1953 when he began painting plywood crosses in his Die Kreuzen series. In this same year, he also began reading mystical texts and made his first photographic self-portraits. Between 1953 and 1959, Rainer executed his most well-known group of works, Die U¨bermalungen (Overpaintings), utilizing a method that was to become a constant in his work. With gloomy colors and a violent technique, Rainer painted over his own paintings, the paintings of other artists, and photographs of Old Masters. Between 1962 and 1968, Rainer was involved

with the Wiener Aktionismus (Vienna Actionism), whose activities sought to challenge accepted beliefs and traditions through performances that were erotic body rituals centered on sacrifice and suffering and could only be documented photographically. A period of preoccupation with the human body and body language followed his involvement with this group, the results of which began in 1968 with the firstGrimace photographsmade using an automatic photograph booth. Since 1969, Rainer has produced numerous series of painted-over and drawn-

over photographs such as Face Farces, a series that he continues today. During the seventies, Rainer increasingly explored

aspects of facial expression and body language. In the Face Farces and Body Poses series, Rainer posed for himself, grimacing, kneeling, lying and seated, nude and clothed. ‘‘Pilot,’’ 1972 and ‘‘Black Bride’’ (Face Coloration), 1969/1970 are two works of these series, respectively. Rainer’s fierce technique of overpainting reflects his anger with the silence of the image described by Rudi Fuchs in the 1986 Arnulf Rainer: Self-Portraits exhibition catalogue as ‘‘The photograph is hit and lashed or tortured to give away its secret, an expression not yet known as part of the culture.’’ The American art critic Donald Kuspit, in an article titled ‘‘Arnulf Rainer: Self-Exposures,’’ has said, ‘‘Rainer wants both the manifest content communicable by the matter-of-fact photograph, and the latent content communicable by the libidinous painterly process. And he wants them simultaneously-all at once.’’ In works such as ‘‘Angst (Portrait of the Artist),’’ 1971 and ‘‘The Birth of an Artist,’’ 1972, Rainer remains himself and does not try to assume a false identity in contras to photographers of the 1990s such as Yasumasa Morimura, Cindy Sherman, or turn-of-the-nineteenth century artist F. Holland Day. In 1973, he began a series of paintings, gestural

Handmalerei (Hand Paintings) and Fingermalerei (Finger Paintings), again painted over a blackand-white photographic background, but done directly with his hands, fingers, and feet, thereby linking his work to Body Art. Arnulf continued his experiments on the body in the cycle Frauenposen (Women Poses), an example of which is Die Rothaarige Reiterin, 1977. In the mid-seventies, Rainer produced over-paintings of photographs of works by a wide variety of artists including nineteenth-century illustrator Gustave Dore´, old masters Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Francisco de Goya, and post-impressionist Vincent van Gogh, known as Kunst auf Kunst (Art on Art); see Vincent van Gogh als Blu¨mler, 1979. Since 1977, he has had a preoccupation with themes of death leading to several series of drawings on photographs: Totenmasken (Death Masks), Leichengesichter (Corpse Faces), and Mumien (Mummies). After discovering the eighteenth-century Austrian sculptor Xavier Messerschmidt, Rainer began using many different techniques to alter images of the sculptor’s work. An example from the Messerschmidt series is ‘‘Der von Fliegen Gequaelte (Messerschmidt-Ueberzeichnung),’’ 1975/1976. In the eighties, Rainer’s interest in spirituality re-

awakened as he returned to a series from the late sixties Die Kreuzen, a number of which included drawings on photographs of crucifixions. In 1982, he produced the Hiroshima series, drawings on 72 photographs of the destroyed city. Rainer’s work is characterized by a constant

search for new art forms and means of expression, as he questions the well known and established. Rainer paints and draws feverishly on his photographs so that sometimes the originals become nearly undetectable. In 1994, over two dozen of Rainer’s paintings were destroyed when someone broke into his studio in Vienna. This persuaded him to resign his teaching position the following year. However, the equally anarchic and provocative Rainer continues to paint over photographs such as ‘‘Giottouebermalung,’’ 1998. In this new series, Schleierbilder (Veil pictures), the paint layers are semi-transparent, allowing the photograph below to shimmer through as the surfaces below and above merge. Rainer taught in Vienna from 1981 to 1995, and

in Stockholm and Berlin after 1981. He has participated in many solo and group exhibitions in public and private venues around the world. In 1971, he was invited to represent Austria in the Sa˜o Paulo Biennial. The following year, he participated in Documenta V in Kassel, West Germany and then participated in Documentas 6 and 7, 1972-1983 (after having participated in Documenta II in 1959). In 1978, he took part in the 38th Venice Biennial. Among his most recent exhibitions were his one-man shows in 1989 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York as well as the 23rd Sa˜o Paulo Biennial in 1996. In the year 2000, his work was the subject of a major exhibition in Amsterdam and Vienna celebrating his seventieth birthday.