After having hosted Arnulf Rainer and his family in Zürich in 2020 to proudly show for the first time his groundbreaking Buchübermalungen [Book overpaintings], we bring to Zug a focused presentation of his series, Swiss Cities.
The oeuvre of Arnulf Rainer spans more than sixty years of a constant and committed research of the expressive possibilities of painting. From the beginning of his career, Rainer has been exploring and experimenting with different techniques and disciplines, especially drawing, printing techniques, photography and painting.
Arnulf Rainer has had solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts in Vienna (1968), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1984), Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York (1989), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Kunstforum Vienna (both in 2000). He represented the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1972, returning in 1978 and 1980, 1984, 1995, 2007, 2011, and he participated in documenta 5, 6 and 7. The Swiss Cities series dating from 1991-2 read like an atlas of this alpine country, which with Rainer and his boundless curiosity interact – leaving an intense and vibrant register of his engagement with visual knowledge and gestural abstraction.
Our warmest thanks go to Arnulf Rainer, Clara Ditz and Hannelore Ditz for their support and expertise.
Krystyna Gmurzynska and Mathias Rastorfer
October 2022
“Such an engraving prompts me to paint something into it, it speaks to me.”
Impressed from the more than 2000 copperplate engravings in ‘Topographia' and 'Theatrum Europaeum’ by Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650), Arnulf Rainer began to search for further engravings of city views, towns, and landscapes from the various periods in order to overwork them.
During one of his visits to a London antiquarian bookshop, he came across early travel literature that dealt almost exclusively with Switzerland, the Alps, and the Rhine. What he found were the first travel guides documenting the beginning of tourism in Europe.
Those historical publications about Switzerland marked the beginning of his collection of books on the subject, which he later expanded to include travel descriptions of almost the entire world.
Hannelore Ditz, daughter of the artist