Albertina museum opens retrospective of Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer

The Albertina museum in Vienna, Austria, opened a retrospective exhibition titled "Selbstgespräche" (Self-Talk) featuring the work of painter Arnulf Rainer.

The museum organized the show relatively spontaneously following the death of the artist on December 18, 2025. Curator Antonia Hoerschelmann arranged the exhibition to provide an international overview of the work of Austria's most famous painter of the post-1960 era.

The exhibition displays a chronological progression of Rainer's career, beginning with his 1951 "vertical compositions" and "centralizations." These works marked a radical departure from the surrealism that inspired his early pieces. After traveling to Paris with his partner Maria Lassnig, Rainer moved toward a minimalist style that mirrored the American avant-garde and the Tachisme movement in France. The curator notes that Rainer viewed painting as a constant process of questioning the medium, the materials, and his own previous creations.

The show includes heavy overpaintings from the late 1950s and large-scale cross images from the 1980s and 1990s. It also features his "Face Farces," which focus on the human body and facial expressions, a theme he presented at the 1978 Venice Biennale. The museum selected these pieces from a collection of approximately 600 works, including pieces from the Essl collection acquired in 2017 and 2018. The exhibition concludes with delicate works created just before Rainer stopped painting in 2017.