Arnulf Rainer: Crystal Cycle

Arnulf Rainer, born in 1929 in Baden, Austria, is undoubtedly not only one of the great masters of Austrian art but in addition also one of the most important present-day European artists. His name is indivisibly linked to "overpainting", which he developed into a specific art form. He already began to overpaint his own and other works in the early 1950s and in the process particularly to include the medium of photography.

In his comprehensive "Crystal Cycle" (2002 – 2003), supplemented with oil paintings from the "Microcosmos-Macrocosmos" series (1994 – 1996), microscopic photographs of mineral layers form the starting point. In the 1980s Arnulf Rainer became a passionate collector of historical books with high-quality lithograph or etching illustrations in the field of botany and zoology. Around ten years later his bibliophile fascination turned to fossils. In the course of his intensive occupation with the "death masks of natural history" he penetrated more and more into the micro-world of organic life and inorganic structures and artistically worked the building plans of life, firstly in the "Microcosmos-Macrocosmos" pictures and later in the "crystal works".