VISAGES
With works from 1970 to 2002, Visages traces the prominence of faces in the work of Arnulf Rainer through three different series: the self-portraits, or Face Farces, the masks of the dead, or Totenmaskes, and finally Schleierbilder, in which the artist uses faces found in classic works from the history of art.
For the artist, the three series represent an attempt to reconstruct painting, as if, in order to exist again, the artist needs to work with pre-existing images, questioning the origin of art and the human motivation for creating these useless images. With a strong emphasis on 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 intentionally, 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 he is a naked man without even needing the classical tools for the act of painting, overflowing with paint in himself, or in his gaze and the physical traces it draws, covering pre-existing images with paint.
The veils of the Schleierbilder pieces are the materialisation of this gaze, with no intention of adding any information to the previous image, but rather of stripping it of the meaning added by habit and art history.