Paris & Surroundings

Arnulf Rainer was born in Baden (Austria) in 1929. Close to fantastic realism, he founded the Hundsgruppe (Dog Group) with Fuchs, Lehmden and Bauer.

Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer was one of the founders of the surrealist-inspired Hundsgruppe art movement in Vienna. Influenced by American abstract expressionism, he used mixed techniques, transforming pre-existing works, usually by other artists, to alter their original meaning. The artist himself has explained his artistic approach, which is akin to an active reinterpretation of the legacy of the past. For each of these three prints, the artist reused an 18th-century matrix depicting a view of the Tuileries palace and gardens, and then engraved drypoint strikethroughs on a second plate to make it partially disappear. This artistic gesture destroys the original work and what it represents, products of a historically dated culture, to radically create an image in which abstraction prevails over subject.