Schwarz auf Blau auf Weiß. 1957.
Oil on canvas.
Twice signed and dated as well as titled verso on the stretcher. Signed in a faint hand on the reverse of the canvas. 58 x 42 cm (22.8 x 16.5 in). [AW].

• “Schwarz auf Blau auf Weiß” (Black on Blue on White) is one of the artist's early and most typical overpaintings from the 1950s. In it, monochrome black covers almost the picture's entire surface.
• Arnulf Rainer creates a mysterious internal structure through the materiality of the paint he applies on the canvas layer by layer with gestural brushstrokes.
• Covering the canvas with color is to be understood as a time-based process.
• Arnulf Rainer left the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna after only a few days and became an autodidact.
• In 1959, he participated in the documenta II in Kassel and the Venice Biennale in 1978 and 1980.

We are grateful to the Studio Rainer for the kind support in cataloging this lot.

PROVENANCE: Art dealer Wolfgang Werner, Berlin.
Private collection, Southern Germany (acquired from the above).

"What motivates Arnulf Rainer to paint over existing pictures is “the special stimulus that the object to be overpainted gives him; the imperfections that demand correction; the challenge of taking something good and making it even better; the complex pleasure of committing a kind of murder by painting over the picture, and the satisfaction of his creative urge in producing a new organic whole. In most cases, the overpainted area can no longer be seen. Still, it lives on as a critical (and by no means arbitrary) component of the final painting, in that it has influenced the process of overpainting with its unique character.”
Hermann Kern, “Übersicht über die künstlerische Entwicklung Arnulf Rainers”, in: Arnulf Rainer, exhibition catalogue, Kunstverein in Hamburg, 1971, p. 3.