7233 - Rainer, Arnulf

Rainer, Arnulf "Arkadenprofil" Oil pastel on sturdy Velin card. 1967. 36.6 x 25.4 cm. Signed “A. Rainer” in pencil lower left, dated and titled; on the reverse, marked “12” and with dimensions written by another hand. In Rainer’s characteristic vigorous, multi-layered line work, the shadowy form of a profile emerges from black strokes interspersed with red and blue accents. The work was created during an important transitional phase in the artist’s career, in which his gestural abstraction increasingly focused on the human body and his own face. It originated from redrawings of his own photo booth pictures showing various facial expressions. The hallucinatory-seeming profile and hyper-drawings from 1964–67 thus mark the very beginning of the artistic development that, starting in 1968, culminated in the famous reworked self-portraits and later “Face Farces.” Provenance: Galerie van de Loo, Munich Estate of Dr. Christian d’Orville, Munich - Please request condition reports for individual lots, as the condition is usually not mentioned in the catalog. - Please ask for condition reports for individual lots, as the condition is usually not mentioned in the catalog.