Arnulf Rainer (1929–2025) was born in Baden bei Wien, Austria, and studied architecture briefly before abandoning it for painting. Largely self-taught, he engaged early with Surrealism and, in 1950, co-founded the short-lived "Hundsgruppe" ("dog group") with fellow Austrian painters Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. A formative setback followed in 1951: travelling to Paris with fellow Austrian painter Maria Lassnig to meet André Breton — often nicknamed the "pope of Surrealism" for his authoritarian grip on the movement — Rainer found his drawings met with open boredom. The rejection pushed him toward something more radical than Surrealism could offer.

In 1952, working without money for new canvases, Rainer began painting directly over existing images — his own earlier work, reproductions, found photographs — layering them with gestural strokes until the original was partially or entirely obscured. He called the resulting practice Übermalung (overpainting), and it became his defining method for the rest of his career, alongside Maria Lassnig recognised as a founder of Austrian Informel painting. What began as practical necessity hardened into philosophy: Rainer described the work as meditations on "the extinction of expression, permanent covering, and contemplative tranquility" — destruction and creation treated as the same act.

From the late 1960s, Rainer turned the technique on himself. Face Farces (1968–75) took photo-booth self-portraits, contorted into grimaces, and overpainted them with the same violent gestural energy he applied to canvas; Body Poses extended the method to his own nude body in extreme, convulsive positions. Loosely associated with, though never formally part of, the Viennese Actionists, Rainer used his own face and body as the surface under attack.

Between 1976 and 1977, he conducted what he called a series of "conversations" with the eighteenth-century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, reworking photographs of Messerschmidt's Charakterköpfe — grimacing busts the sculptor had made in an attempt to catalogue every extreme human expression. Rather than applying paint, Rainer worked the drypoint needle directly into the printing plate, scratching and layering marks until the original grimace was only partially recoverable from the resulting mist of incised lines — the same obscuring logic as his overpaintings, translated into a technique specific to intaglio. From 1979, he turned to a darker subject still: photographs of death masks, both of known historical figures and anonymous deceased individuals, overpainted with the same intensity — an extended meditation on mortality that ran through much of his later career.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this sustained confrontation with erasure and death, institutional recognition followed steadily across seven decades. Rainer's first solo exhibition took place in 1955 at Vienna's Galerie St. Stephan; he went on to participate in documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1977, and 1982, represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 1978, and designed the Austrian Pavilion for the 1984 edition. Major retrospectives followed at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (2010) and the Albertina in Vienna (2014), alongside presentations at the Stedelijk Museum, the Guggenheim, and the Centre Pompidou. He served as Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1981 to 1995, and in 2009 the Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in his hometown of Baden bei Wien, dedicated entirely to his work. He died on 18 December 2025 in Enzenkirchen, Austria, at the age of 96.

Face Farces (1968–75), Rainer's series of overpainted photo-booth self-portraits, remains his most psychologically direct body of work — his own contorted, grimacing face attacked with the same gestural violence he applied to canvas.

The death mask series (from 1979) overpainted photographs of both famous and anonymous deceased individuals, extending his lifelong preoccupation with erasure into a direct confrontation with mortality itself.

Schwarze Übermalung auf Braun (1955/56), an early overpainting sold at Ketterer Kunst in 2023, reportedly came close to doubling his previous auction record — confirmation that his earliest, most foundational overpaintings remain among his most sought-after works.

Rainer extended his overpainting method directly into printmaking, working in two related but distinct ways: etchings and lithographs reworked afterward with paint, in the manner of his canvases, and drypoints where the needle itself performed the obscuring — scratched directly into the plate over an existing photographic image until it dissolved into dense, layered incisions. Büste im Nebel (1977), reworking a photograph of a Messerschmidt sculpture this way, exemplifies the technique at its most precise: erasure achieved not through pigment, but through the accumulated weight of the needle's own marks.

His editions frequently echo major series, including works related to his crosses, death masks, and gestural abstractions, translating the same intensity onto paper at a more accessible scale.

Prices for Rainer's signed prints and editions vary considerably by technique and rarity, generally ranging from the low thousands for smaller etchings to the mid five figures for more significant, densely worked pieces — a broad range reflecting seven decades of genuinely varied production.

For collectors, Rainer's editions offer direct access to one of postwar Austria's most radical and philosophically serious practices. Works are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou.