Arnulf Rainer

Arnulf Rainer (Austria, 1929–2025) developed a practice centered on painting, performance, photography, and video, accompanied by an extensive body of written work. He died in Austria on December 18, 2025.

Associated with the Viennese Actionism movement, he explored gesturality and body language through performative actions, photographic self-portraits, and painting executed with his hands. Interested in automatism and the subversion of conventional communication, he manipulated his own images and those of other artists until they reached a state of abstraction and the forms were almost completely obscured. He also experimented with canvases in unconventional formats and established links between the theatrical and the graphic.

He was a member of the Royal Academies of Fine Arts in Berlin and Vienna. In 1981, he received the Max Beckmann Prize in Frankfurt, and in 1989, the International Photography Prize in New York. His work is exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Arnulf Rainer Museum, which opened in Baden in 2009.