Neo Rauch

Bursting with radiant and unsettling juxtapositions, Neo Rauch’s paintings are wormholes into worlds of startling psychological power and cultural collisions. His scenes involve the viewer in a history that is at once mythic, intimate, and present. Through a deep consideration of philosophy, art history, literature, and his own dreamscape, Rauch’s paintings depict the precipices of progress and the struggles of communication. Electrified by their rich palettes, Rauch’s fragmented landscapes and timeless characters dance between pop and baroque, social and psychological, graphic and painterly.

Born in Leipzig in 1960, Rauch learned his trade behind the Iron Curtain. His influences and interests were shaped by personal hardship and the tumultuous changes in East Germany after the Wall fell. In the late 1980s, having finished his studies at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig, he explored diverse approaches to painting in dialogue with works he encountered by Francis Bacon, the New Wild painters, and the pre-Renaissance painters he saw during his travels in Italy. By 1993, he had arrived at the unique style of intertwining figuration and abstraction that characterizes his oeuvre and has brought him international attention and respect.

Only a book of truly epic scale could begin to unpack the emotional, historical, and formal density of Rauch’s canvases. Comprising over 450 pages, including more than 250 large-scale reproductions, this monograph is the most inclusive collection of his work to date. It offers a generous range of writings that illuminate the personal, symbolic, and formal complexities of Rauch’s world. Wolfgang Büscher’s open and sensitive account of a walk through Rauch’s neighborhood reveals the painter’s compassion and modesty. Harald Kunde tracks Rauch’s stylistic development through its main semantic threads and historical influences. Gary Tinterow draws from his work on Rauch’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to offer the reader a guide to the symbols that form the painter’s extensive mythology. These essays complement Rauch’s work with nuanced insights while allowing the images room to speak on their own. Within this atlas, readers will discover the rich density and enigmatic openness of Rauch’s paintings.

Limited Art Edition of 100 signed copies, each with the chalk lithograph Heimkehr, 2010, printed on handmade paper with a hand-lever press and signed by Neo Rauch. Also available as a signed Limited Collector's Edition (copies No. 101-1,100).

The artist: Neo Rauch (*1960) graduated from the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) as master student of Bernhard Heisig in 1990. In 1997 he won the art prize of the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper which lead to a first institutional exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig. The breakthrough year was 2000 with a touring exhibition at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and at the Kunsthalle Zürich. Since then he has shown at a variety of venues including the Venice Biennale, a solo show at the Vienna Albertina, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York; in 2010 a major double retrospective simultaneously opened in Leipzig and Munich. Rauch lives and works in Leipzig.