The Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer is renowned for his “Übermalungen”. Over his six-decade-long career, he has layered brushstrokes over existing artworks to highlight, protect or erase underlying motifs in an iconoclastic gesture. Our solo show on the booth in Spark echoes his new exhibition at Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris which assembles around 40 paintings from the ‘Ex-Nihilo’ series (2015 and 2016). This series reveals a new departure in Rainer’s oeuvre, as the gesture made to execute the paintings was more focused on wrist movements than large arm movements. What also distinguishes these new works is that they have been realized in smaller formats than the large formats for which the artist is known.
The change of scale nevertheless retains a power of expression, the spatial organization of the canvases being characterized by the superposition and juxtaposition of large, slender forms and plays of transparency. According to Corinna Thierolf, former director of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and author of the catalogue text accompanying the exhibition, this "quasi-verticality of these features makes us feel the unshakeable physical presence of the painter in the face of the placeless void.”
