PAST EXHIBITION

Arnulf Rainer: Paintings, Photographs and Drawings 1955-1985

November 29, 2007—January 5, 2008

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a thirty-year retrospective of paintings, photographs and drawings by Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer. Rainer was born on December 8, 1929 in Baden, Austria just 15 miles south of Vienna, into a culture under the spell of Weltuntergangsstimmung, an often- cited “end-of-the-world mood” of the crumbling Habsburg monarchy. To break the psychological epidemic, Viennese artists sought to better understand the human psyche in order to find a reason and perhaps even a diagnosis for their cultural paralysis. While the Austrian art scene, lead by the Surrealists looked inwardly, the majority of the European art scene, taking cues from the great Paris schools, looked outwardly, engrossed in the new perspectives offered by Cubism. Rainer enrolled at the top Vienna art academies and quickly found that traditional training left him uninspired. After less than a week, he dropped out of each school so that he could pursue his own artist course. The following year later he founded and pioneered the young Hundsgruppe (Dog’s Group) with Ernst Fuchs, Arik
Brauer and Josef Mikl.

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