(born in Baden near Vienna in 1929)
Untitled, proportion, signed and dated twice (horizontally and vertically) A. Rainer 54 on the supporting sheet, on the reverse of the supporting sheet: An Schöttle A Rainer, oil on cardboard, 23 x 29 cm resp. 29 x 23 cm, with supporting sheet 45 x 62 cm resp. 62 x 45 cm, framed

According to the owner, this “Proportionsgestaltung” was mounted by the artist himself - compare: Arnulf Rainer. “Aller Anfang ist schwer” / “The Beginning is Always the Hardest”, Arnulf Rainer Museum/DuMont, 2009, p. 149 (this work is also signed and dated horizontally and vertically)

Exhibited and illustrated in the catalogue:
Kunst im Aufbruch. Abstraktion zwischen 1945 und 1959. Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 18 October 1998 – 31 January 1999, p. 97

Provenance:
Private collection, Dresden (transport label on the covering board on the reverse: hasenkamp (Kunsttransporte) Ausstellung “Kunst im Aufbruch” Leihgeber Albertinum D-01067 Dresden ... Wilhelm-Hack-Museum D-67059 Ludwigshafen)
Private Collection, Germany

On the “Proportions”collages 1953/54 After I had worked on automatistic scribble expressions and blind drawings exclusively throughout 1951/52, in the spring of 1953 I decided to take what seemed to me at the time a dialectical step: I attempted pictorial art form based solely on proportions of colour weight, surface area, and volume. The starting point was colour collages, which I produced by parallel displacement of coloured papers through equilibrium tests.

For technical reasons, the coloured papers laid horizontally, so that even today it is difficult for me to determine where top and bottom, right and left are. These colour proportions were the starting point for about 100 oil paintings and 30 sculptures, almost all of which I then destroyed in a fit of despair (and with unsolvable storage problems) after they were exhibited with great failure at the Würthle Gallery in Vienna in autumn 1954. Later, only a few were shown in 1956 at the Galerie St. Stephan together with the first overpaintings. It was there that Msgr. Otto Mauer succeeded in selling the only such oil painting to a young German student (named Dieter Honisch).
Arnulf Rainer
From: Arnulf Rainer – Schriften, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010