martin rainer prize "peripheries"

The Rainer family and the South Tyrolean Artists' Association are announcing the third edition of the Martin Rainer Prize . While previous editions focused on the themes of art and space and art in transition, this year's prize is themed "Peripheries." 

Like the previous competition themes, the periphery plays a central role in Martin Rainer's work. The Brixen-based artist was never concerned with what was at the center, never with what was statically balanced or precisely calibrated. Rather, his gaze was directed towards the edges, the frayed border areas where contours become blurred. He elevated these places of the blurred, the unfinished, and the imperfect to the center of his artistic creation – true to his credo, "the perfect is majestic and boring." He was drawn to people on the margins of society, those who straddle realities, and seemingly insignificant things—these undefined and undefinable themes. Those ambiguous matters, where the plumb line isn't in the middle and much still seems possible, piqued his interest. As if the name were a program, it can be understood as a fitting and programmatic coincidence that these edges are also reflected in the artist's name: Der Rain, which according to Grimm's dictionary refers to that "strip of land" "that was left uncultivated between the arable land of two districts." 

In his work, Martin Rainer was a precise observer of these peripheries , these " rains ." Quietly and sensitively, he transferred their characteristics into his art, always searching for a reciprocal harmony between content and form. 

It is no coincidence that outline and contour play a crucial role in his sculptures. The space between the masses is not unintentionally more important to him than the sculpted form. And it is not by chance that he focuses his attention on carefully considered spaces – “like in music […] otherwise you always have the same note.” On a formal level, these are precisely those uncultivated edges , the margins, that he creates on sought and expressed content on a content level - and in doing so attempted to achieve a balance between content and form.