'Visages'
With works from 1970 to 2002, Visages explores the role of faces in Arnulf Rainer's work through three different series: self-portraits, or Face Farces, masks of the dead, or Totenmaskes, and finally Schleierbilder, in which the artist uses faces that he finds in classic works of art history.
The three series represent an attempt by the artist to reconstruct painting, as if, in order to exist again, the artist needed to work with pre-existing images, questioning the origin of art and the human motivation to create these useless images. With a prominent role for the Face Farces, which illustrate a person who can only express himself through the movements of his body, in an attempt by the artist to dissolve himself as a metaphorical gesture of forgetting, totally intentional, what art is, this exhibition brings together a series of works that insist on the idea that art finds its origin in the artist. Whether it is a naked man without even the need for the classic tools for the act of painting, overflowing with paint in himself, or in his gaze and the physical strokes that he draws covering pre-existing images with paint.
The veils in the Schleierbilder pieces are the materialization of this gaze, with no intention of adding any information to the previous image, but rather stripping it of the meaning added by habit and art history.