Arnulf Rainer – Pyrol

Pyrol (2024) is a hand-signed and numbered etching on wove paper, published by Lelong Editions, Paris, in an edition of 25.

A single red field, built from countless fine, sweeping strokes, fills almost the entire plate. Only a small pale wedge in the upper right corner is left open, so the colour reads as a mass that has been worked over and over until the ground nearly disappears. The sheet follows the logic of Rainer's overpaintings, in which covering an image is the act itself, and which since the 1950s have made concealment, density, and gesture the centre of his work.

Pyrol dates from the final years of his life. Rainer died in Vienna in December 2025 at the age of 96, and the print shows him still testing colour and line on the etching plate late in his career.

Arnulf Rainer (1929–2025) was an Austrian painter, draughtsman and printmaker, born in Baden near Vienna. He was one of the most influential Austrian artists of the post-war period. After brief spells at Vienna art schools, he began working independently in the late 1940s. In 1950 he co-founded the Hundsgruppe, a Vienna circle of young artists.

From the early 1950s he developed his best-known method, the Übermalungen (overpaintings). He covered paintings, photographs and his own earlier work with dense layers of black or colour until the underlying image almost disappeared. This process of concealing and layering became the basis of his work. In the late 1960s and 1970s he applied it to photographs of his own face and body, in the series known as Face Farces and Body Poses. Later groups of work include finger paintings and cross-shaped compositions.

Rainer worked across painting, drawing, photography and printmaking, and etching remained part of his practice into his final years. He was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1978 and taught at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts from 1981 to 1995. His work is held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Arnulf Rainer Museum in Baden is dedicated to his work. He died in Vienna in December 2025.