Neo Rauch

Almost singlehandedly, Leipzig school painter Neo Rauch has renewed the possibilities of allegory, politics and surrealism in contemporary painting. His richly textured, fantastically seductive paintings are marked by a “distinctive Pop-Surrealist-Social Realist style,” as described by The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith in 2002. In many of his compositions, human figures engaged in manual labor or indeterminable tasks work against backdrops of mundane architecture, industrial settings, or bizarre and often barren landscapes. These figures, though squarely centered in his paintings, often have the appearance of being part of still lifes devoid of a human presence or collaged elements belonging to different time zones. Scale is frequently arbitrary and non-perspectival, which adds to an overall dreamlike atmosphere; the spatial relationships construct their own imaginary realm.

Inspired as much by Old Masters as by the rebelliousness of painters Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff, Rauch’s work refuses fixed interpretation and defies categorization. In Das Gut (2008), the artist presents three figures seemingly embroiled in a lovers’ quarrel, as a disquietingly stoic heroine stands between a man wielding a sword and his defenseless victim. Upon closer inspection, a stranger scene is revealed, as the male figures’ legs converge and dissolve into an amorphous finlike appendage. In the background, the same threesome is involved in an equally nebulous scene. Despite the art historical precedence, this gesture of continuous narrative, common to early Italian Renaissance painting, highlights feelings of disorientation. 

Rauch’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions internationally, including BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in Germany, Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Germany, Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Austria, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain, and the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Courtesy of David Zwirner