‘I consider artistic creation to be first an inner monologue. A little like the dream continues in deep sleep, the covering of a painting is the continuation of this monologue in silence’ – Arnulf Rainer

With its gestural swathes of oil and oilstick laid over a photograph mounted on wood, Rote Hand (Red Hand) (1985-1988) is a vibrant multi-layered work by Arnulf Rainer. Inspired early on by Surrealism, Rainer played an important role in the evolution of Art Informel in Austria during the early 1950s and later came to be associated with Viennese Actionism, all while forging his own abstract, appropriative path. He first began to make his famed Overpaintings (Übermalungen), in which he painted over pre-existing artworks or photographs, the year after a visit to Paris in 1951. His brushstrokes worked in dialogue with the images even as he obscured them; evoking aspects of the Surrealists’ écriture automatique, or ‘automatic writing’, he conceived his process as a mystical, meditative act. Although he refused full allegiance to their group, the theatrical, bodily aspects of his work also aligned him with the Viennese Actionists—Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—who came to prominence during the following decade. As its title indicates, the present work is from a series of overpainted medieval pictures of Christ, which Rainer began making in the early 1980s. The Saviour is here subsumed in a bold arc of blue-black impasto, beneath descending torrents of orange, bright yellow and blazing red. The work seems to propose the vitality of colour and movement as its own form of devotion: indeed, Rainer saw his method as a mode of intellectual worship, explaining that ‘this progressive participation in the obscuration or immersion of the painting, its gradual return to peace and invisibility … could be compared to the contemplative experience of religious life’ (A. Rainer, quoted at https://ropac.net/artists/72-arnulf-rainer/).