When the Albertina in Vienna organizes a retrospective for Arnulf Rainer's 85th birthday in a year's time, birthday, this will certainly not happen without reason and a brilliant review of a complex work. The Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Gallery in Innsbruck has already organized an exhibition and is publishing a catalog with an anthology of Rainer's works, which has rarely been assembled and viewed until now. They are overpaintings of photographs from the 1960s to the present day with erotic, sometimes even pornographic motifs. Arnulf Rainer seems to react very emotionally to the women's bodies in these works; he crosses out, heightens, caricatures, accentuates and sometimes violates the surfaces in which he literally digs his contribution. Sometimes it seems as if he wants to work his way through the photographic layer to his partners. »The process of this confrontation takes – and this anthology shows this very well – very different forms of engagement. This changes from elegant lineament, a tactile drawing that encompasses and encompasses the body, to painterly revision, whereby the flowing and splashing of color certainly evokes associations with sexual processes, and sometimes the photographic work is completely drowned in colour,« writes Peter Weiermair in his introductory text. Andrea Madesta, the second author of the volume, on the other hand, sometimes takes a critical look at the image of women as we see it in Arnulf Rainer's work and the historically conditioned, radical examination of values ​​and conventions.