In our new exhibition we present paintings from the late nineties not shown in public before – Schleierbilder (veiled pictures) and Blattmalereien (leaf paintings) are confronted with Microcosm/Macrocosm as well as new Hand and Finger Paintings. While the first are painted directly onto the open-pored wooden panel in thin, scumbled layers of paint, thus merging with the latter to form transcendently luminous bodies of colour, the latter, through liquid paint on a porous and napped, perforated and scratched painting surface, build up into a softly gleaming, velour-like texture or bear gentle caresses of colour, applied by the artist’s hand on a white base, or else pastose and dark-in-dark, wildly expressive mounds of paint. ‘Rainer’s painting, since the nineteen-fifties, has unfolded in a dialectic tension between the poles of a gentle, meditative application of paint and a physically powerful expressiveness. His method of the slow painting-over, that often leads to almost monochrome paintings, forms a contrast to the gestural and body-related work series, produced at great speed, such as the Finger Paintings or the Face Farces.’

(Alte Pinakothek, Munich, from a text on the exhibition Arnulf Rainer Der Übermaler, 10 June to 5 Sept 2010)

With his latest works on paper, decisively dark gestures on bright grounds, Rainer carries on themes he already dealt with in the fifties and sixties.