Peter Weiermair

Rainer and the Women Peter Weiermair

When the Albertina in Vienna dedicates a retrospective to Arnulf Rainer to mark his 85th birthday this year, it will no doubt be a brilliant review of a multifaceted body of work. This book presents for the first time an anthology of Rainer s overpainted photographs of women, created from the 1960s to the present images with erotic, even pornographic subjects. The process of his confrontation ... varies between elegant lineament, a tactile drawing encompassing and surrounding the body, and overpainting, whereby the flowing and spraying of the paint has clear associations with sexual acts, and sometimes the photographic work is entirely drowned in paint, writes critic Peter Weiermair in his introductory text. In contrast, writer Andrea Madesta takes a critical view of the images of women and the historically conditioned, radical confrontation with social values and conventions in Rainer s work.

Published by Snoeck, Germany; and Gallerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna