Modern Art - Austria / II. Republic of Austria 2011 - 62 Euro Cent

Personal details: Born on 8 December 1929 in Baden near Vienna, Arnulf Rainer first visited the National Political Educational Institute in Traiskirchen. However, because he was forced by an art teacher to draw after nature, he left prematurely this school. In 1947 he saw for the first time contemporary art at an exhibition of the British Council in Klagenfurt. At the request of his parents, he studied from 1947 at the Staatsgewerbeschule in Villach and graduated in 1949. In the same year he was accepted at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, which he left after one day because of an artistic controversy. Shortly thereafter, he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but also escaped from this again after only three days, because his work was described as degenerate. In 1950, together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Anton Lehmden, Wolfgang Hollegha, Markus Prachensky and Josef Mikl, he founded the artist group "Hundsgruppe", with which he exhibited for the first and only time in 1951. In 1953 he met the Catholic priest Otto Mauer in Vienna, who a year later founded the Galerie nächst St. Stephan, with which the Austrian avant-garde was greatly encouraged. In November 1955, Mauer opened Rainer's first solo exhibition in the Galerie St. Stephan. From 1953 to 1959, the artist lived in a secluded, abandoned villa of his parents in Gainfarn near Bad Vöslau - there he began the series of reductions, which is regarded as a preliminary to his world-famous overpainting. In 1967 he moved into a large studio on Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna; One year later, his first retrospective took place in the Viennese Museum of the 20th Century. Over the past decades, the award-winning painter has developed into one of the most renowned artists in Austria, whose works have been exhibited in all major museums and galleries around the world; in Baden near Vienna there is a personalized Arnulf Rainer Museum. The broad oeuvre of the "renovator of Austrian painting" ranges from surrealism and tachism to informel and gestures to the typical cross paintings and overpaintings. The title of the expressive work on the new special stamp is "Angst", it dates from the years 1969/73 (oil on photo on wood, original size 119.5 x 87.5 cm).