"Along with Hermann Nitsch, Günter Brus, and Otto Muehl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler was a prominent member of the Viennese Actionism movement. Officially founded in July 1964, it placed the body at the center of the artwork both for its empirical potential for cognition and its power to confront and oppose the taboos of the conservative postwar, post-Fascist Austrian society.
Schwarzkogler might have been the most conceptually oriented member of the Vienna Actionists. His abstract monochromatic paintings from the early 1960s already reflect a theoretical rigor that linked him to such artists as Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, while his interest in the body is demonstrated by works like Untitled “Tableau-Sigmund-Freud” (circa 1965), a white monochrome whose surface is interrupted by a razor blade."-Walker Art Center

"Schwarzkogler is one of four Viennese artists who grouped themselves under the title Wiener Aktionsgruppe, or the ‘Vienna Action Group’, in 1965. Hermann Nitsch (born 1938), Otto Mühl (born 1925) and Günter Brus (born 1938) created ritualistic performances or Actions aimed at releasing repressed desires and bringing about a state of cathartic awareness through acts which often subverted traditional authorities and broke taboos. The Actions were initially conceived in relation to the activity of painting. Paint and organic substitutes for paint, such as blood and food, are common materials used in combination with the artists’ and performers’ bodies."-Tate Gallery

He is best known today for photographs depicting his series of closely controlled "Aktionen" featuring such iconography as a dead fish, a dead chicken, bare light bulbs, colored liquids, bound objects, and a man wrapped in gauze. The enduring themes of Schwarzkogler's works involved experience of pain and mutilation, often in an incongruous clinical context, such as 3rd Aktion (1965) in which a patient's head swathed in bandages is being pierced by what appears to be a corkscrew, producing a bloodstain under the bandages. They reflect a message of despair at the disappointments and hurtfulness of the world.

Rudolf Schwarzkogler (b. 1940) originated from Vienna, Austria. His father was a doctor and his mother was a cosmetician. He studied at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna from 1957-1961 and served in the Austrian army from 1962-1963. Select notable exhibition include, "Rudolf Schwarzkogler Aktions 1965-1966" at the Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis; "Identity and Alterity, Figures of the Body 1895/1995" at Venice Biennale 46, Museo Correr, Venice; and "Journey into an Altered State: Paul McCarthy, Rudolf Schwarzkogler" at the Austrian Cultural Institute, New York. In 1996, the Smithsonian's Hirschhorn Museum dedicated the focus of their Directions series on the life and work of Schwarzkogler.