(born in Baden near Vienna in 1929)
Untitled, 1979, overworked painting, on the reverse signed, dated A. Rainer 79 and inscribed with “Totaler Quatsch” (complete nonsense) (crossed out), oil on cardboard, 73 x 51 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich - there acquired in the early 1990s
Private Collection, Germany

When I started to paint over my own pictures in 1952 (from 1953 onwards, I also painted over other people’s), I didn’t have the answers to the questions of why, what for, how long. It was only slowly, as the years went by, that closed-off black surfaces or bundles of lines developed, in which I recognised myself, immersing myself and representing myself in them.
I am still amending these images today, continuing to reach a complete blackout, although I have long forgotten what was underneath. My favourite thing is to work on the overpainting of an overpainting. I never wanted to destroy them, I wanted to perfect them. I needed a certain positive contact with the revised form of the image. I carry out my artistic work primarily, albeit not exclusively, as a soliloquy. Just as dreams continue into deep sleep, for example, the overpainting sees this self-talk develop into silence. This silence is communicable: otherwise, other people would not snatch from me first and foremost those pictures which I create out of pure self-communication and which I hope, one day, to be able to guide to the expression of complete peace, precisely that same deep sleep or prenatal security or eternal peace or whatever it is called.
The more overpainted the picture, the more difficult every subsequent step becomes until it is completely closed off. Only years of work on a piece erases all the cheap or valuable effects. Today, as I am also occupied with other artistic problems, I paint an average of one brushstroke per month on these works, as far as they are still in my possession. They will still undergo major changes until my death, which means they will grow more and more until only small flashes of white, edges or corners, remain, and maybe not even that. .....
Arnulf Rainer
From: Von den Übermalungen zur Zumalung. Text zu einem (bezeichnenderweise) nicht realisierten Buchvorhaben. 1973