Arnulf Rainer

Arnulf RAINER was born on Decem­ber 8, 1929 in Baden near Vien­na. From 1947 to 1949, he stud­ied at the State Trade School in Vil­lach. He sub­se­quent­ly stud­ied for a short time at the Acad­e­my of Applied Arts and the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Vien­na. Ini­tial­ly inspired by the styles of Fan­tas­tic Art and Abstract Real­ism, Rain­er devel­oped his own artis­tic voice at an ear­ly age. Togeth­er with Ernst Fuchs, Anton Lehm­den, Arik Brauer, Wolf­gang Hol­legha, and Josef Mikl, he found­ed the artists’ group “Hunds­gruppe.” In 1951, he turned away from the Fan­tas­tic and began his “blind paint­ings.” At the same time, he cre­at­ed his first over­paint­ings, to which he devot­ed him­self inten­sive­ly until the mid-1960s. Togeth­er with Josef Mikl, Wolf­gang Hol­legha, and Markus Prachen­sky, Arnulf Rain­er became a mem­ber of the “Maler­gruppe der Galerie St. Stephan” in 1956. In 1959, togeth­er with Ernst Fuchs and Frieden­sre­ich Hun­dert­wass­er, he found­ed the artists’ group “Pina­to­ri­um,” which remained active until 1968. In 1981, Rain­er became a mem­ber of the Acad­e­my of Arts in Berlin and accept­ed an appoint­ment at the Acad­e­my of Fine Arts in Vien­na, where he taught until 1995. The Arnulf Rain­er Muse­um opened in 2009 in the his­toric women’s bath­house in Baden, which had been used as a region­al exhi­bi­tion cen­ter since 1973. Arnulf Rain­er received numer­ous awards and hon­ors, includ­ing the Aus­tri­an State Prize for Graph­ic Arts in 1966 and the Grand Aus­tri­an State Prize in 1978. In 2015, Rain­er was award­ed the Aus­tri­an Cross of Hon­or for Sci­ence and Art. Arnulf Rain­er, one of the most influ­en­tial con­tem­po­rary artists and one of Austria’s best-known painters, is con­sid­ered the founder of Informel in Aus­tria. He achieved inter­na­tion­al fame through his over­paint­ings. The artist died on Decem­ber 18, 2025. 2016 – first exhi­bi­tion at Galerie Welz.