Neo Rauch: Arbeiten auf Papier / Works on Paper 2003-2004

Art critic Rudij Bergmann has stated, "For Neo Rauch, painting is reflection on what is no longer present. His is a decidedly romantic attitude of refusal that gives deeper meaning to figures frozen strangely in motion--as an allegory of universal alienation from the world and rejection of technology and as a melancholy homage to the unfulfilled promise of freedom and human happiness. There is a constant stream of memory in these works, not only of world history but also of childhood, Pop Art, and comics." Rauch possesses an artistic style and sensibility that place his paintings among the most original of our time. Rauch's palettes and compositions are reminiscent of postwar illustrations; so are his figures. They belong in the past, constantly at work in a world filled with industrial symbolism. These symbols, themselves easily identified, are difficult to interpret in the context of the works, in part due to Rauch's painterly style, ominous colors and skewed perspectives. The dichotomies at play in his work provide an overall sense of false comfort tinged with disturbance, of a situation brewing, threatening to reveal itself. This book presents his recent large works on paper completed in 2003 and 2004.

Born in 1960 in Leipzig, Neo Rauch is a lifelong resident of Germany. He has shown his work at The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and in the past year alone at venues in London, Prague, Montreal, Santa Fe and Osaka. His work has been covered by the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and Artforum, and is in the collections of both The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York.