(born in Baden near Vienna 1929)
„Schweiß und Blut“(Rote Schwitze), Face Farces, c. 1971, signed A. Rainer, titled Schweiß und Blut (Rote Schwitze), oil on photograph, 60.6 x 50.5 cm, mounted along the edges on Alu Dibond on cardboard, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Vienna

Self-portrayals

When I reproduce myself, this also takes the form of an attempt at expansion: visual formulations of things that are possible, things that I have come up with. I pull myself up by the scruff of my own neck, I jump up without anything underneath me, I simulate things that I have invented, I draw the things I have imagined, I lie and lie until it might become true. I don’t reproduce things exactly, instead, I get there through the act of reproduction.
These self-imaginings, corrections, wishful reproductions are created in three phases of which the first is a scenic photo release. It has to be the most compressed, because it is concentrated on the single moment of the shutter release. There can be no correction - ‘only the moment counts’. Mostly I need a mirror, not for control but for stimulation, a kind of extroverted self-communication. I am not interested in defined, targeted portrayals, or the familiar typecasting of the actor. Only in the moment of realisation am I able to search for or find what wants to be activated in me.

The third phase, another selection and correction, often begins weeks later, when everything has become nothing more than a flat sheet of paper. I draw over it and try hard to invent new important, more significant lies. Only when I begin to believe them myself do I abandon the sheet. The stronger the physiognomic quality, the faster the graphic accentuation succeeds. I then finish quickly and do not slip into completly overpainting. ...

Arnulf Rainer