Arnulf Rainer is certainly the most important artist of the Austrian post-war avant-garde. In 1950, on his first trip to Paris with Maria Lassnig, whom he had met in Klagenfurt in 1948, Rainer met André Breton, poet, writer and most important theorist of Surrealism. Under the impression of the gestural paintings of Jean Paul Riopelle and Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), the latter of whom he also met in Paris in 1950, Rainer turned away from the idea of Surrealism, which had hitherto isolated him, and moved on to abstract micro-structures. The first "overpaintings" were created around 1953, which are undoubtedly among the most genuine, but also most controversial contemporary contributions to art after 1945. Ultimately, they accompany his entire work.

In search of an answer to the general question regarding the path painting should take in the second half of the 20th century, Rainer believed that it was at first necessary to delve into the unconscious in the spirit of the surrealists. In order to give a new beginning a chance, a state of dissolution needed to be initiated, which – as Rainer put it – ends in a “tabula rasa”, the so-called “Auflösungen” (Dissolutions). These dissolved, atomized forms then give him an opportunity to start anew, to be covered and erased again. Next to the “Proportionen” and the "Blindzeichnungen" (Blind Drawings), Rainer made first black pictures like our “Übermalung” (Overpainting) as of the mid-1950s, which, like many of his works at the time, was revised again and again: "I wanted the darkness, the almost fully black picture. De-expression, permanent disguise, contemplative calm, those were the principles of my work between 1953 and 1965", explained the artist. This way the black-in-black gains this fascinating, contrasting haptic structure. Years later, in 1978, Arnulf Rainer said about his method and approach: "As already emphasized, my overpaintings are done slowly, steadily, carefully. The great effort involved in repainting is broken down into small, gradual steps that last for years. When I started to smear over my own works and those of others in 1954, I didn't know that a 99 percent black field could result as an image form, that such a reduction stil qualified as form, that it could be communicated to others. It was not a concept, but this path emerged step by step. The driving force behind it was the constant insufficiency with the respective black form, with the imperfection of the surface complex that had been developed up to that point. Sometimes I was overcome by despair, I feared that I would completely lose the message of the picture. Even today I often don't know when to stop, whether the new brushstroke makes the picture even better." (Arnulf Rainer, in: Reste, Stuttgart and London, Stuttgart 1978)

The present "Übermalung" is a typical and magnificent overpainting from the mid-1950s, in which the black monochrome covers almost the entire image area. The artist only allows the delicate, almost erotic pink of the background to shine through in provocative contrast to the deep black in the upper left corner. Through the materiality of the paint, which is applied layer by layer onto the hardboard with gestural brush strokes, Rainer created a mysterious internal structure, a unified pictorial space. Observers understand the covering of the canvas with paint as a temporal process. Rainer raises awareness of the time factor through his overpaintings. On the one hand, it erases most of what had been there before, and, on the other hand, it increases the idea of the possible abundance behind the color. With his “overpaintings”, Arnulf Rainer was and still is one of the most important and most controversial artists in Austria. [MvL]