Neo Rauch

"What has been most striking to me in the work of Neo Rauch is that it gave me a certain flashback to my early childhood, the opportunity to perceive a surprising and incomprehensible world with wonder while experiencing excitement, curiosity and sometimes fear. This has to do with the scale of the work in relation to the beholder, the use of color, and most of all, the way he manages to withdraw his imagery from incidental-contemporary features. The different elements in the paintings originate from various eras and places, provoking an autonomous space where the specific is transposed to the general, thus creating a detached universality where we are freed from references and signifiers in which we are accustomed."
Michael Borremans, excerpted from his text to Neo Rauch: Paintings.

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

NEO RAUCH: SELECTED WORKS 1993-2012
Text by Harald Kunde.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775735162 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 6/30/2013
Forthcoming

ACTIVE BACKLIST

NEO RAUCH: THE GRAPHIC WORK, 1993-2012
Foreword by Kerstin Wahala. Text by Rudij Bergmann. Interview by Wolfgang Büscher.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775733106 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 9/30/2012
Active | In stock

NEO RAUCH: PAINTINGS
Edited by Hans-Werner Schmidt, Bernhart Schwenk.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775725217 | US $85.00
Pub Date: 8/31/2010
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

NEO RAUCH: PARA
Text by Werner Spies, Gary Tinterow.
DUMONT BUCHVERLAG
ISBN: 9783832190095 | US $37.50
Pub Date: 2/28/2010
Out of Print | Not available

NEO RAUCH: NEUE ROLLEN
DUMONT BUCHVERLAG
ISBN: 9783832177423 | US $59.95
Pub Date: 12/15/2009
Out of Print | Not available

NEO RAUCH: WORKS PAPER 2003-2004
Essay by Harald Kunde.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775715010 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 2/15/2005
Out of print | Not available

NEO RAUCH
Artwork by Neo Rauch. Text by Harald Szeemann, Daniel Birnbaum, Lynne Cooke.
HATJE CANTZ PUBLISHERS
ISBN: 9783775712439 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 10/2/2002
Out of print | Not available

Neo Rauch

Leipzig-based Neo Rauch is known for haunting, large-scale paintings that operate like eerie, universal dreams. In the major 2010 monograph, Paintings, Rauch comments on the way in which his paintings continue from dreams: "These half-awake moments in which the flotsam accumulates in my catch basin and rearranges itself to a new organization are the essence of my painting… This is why I believe that I can view painting as the continuation of the dream with other media." Featured image, "Glück," from 2006, is reproduced from Paintings.

Neo Rauch: Selected Works 1993-2012

Text by Harald Kunde.
Published by Hatje Cantz

Almost singlehandedly, Leipzig school painter Neo Rauch has renewed the possibilities of allegory, politics and surrealism in contemporary painting. His epic canvases, with their disjunct components, resemble collages as much as painting, populated with characters seemingly plucked from momentous historical occasions--protestors, eminent-looking statesmen, soldiers, workers--as well as ordinary people engaged in bizarre, enigmatic actions of no apparent political/historical consequence whatsoever. The protagonists of these works, surrounded by floating symbols, abstract blobs and fragments of buildings and interiors, collide as if in some grand trans-historical continuum in which all eras come together. Realized in loud, garish hues partly informed by the artist’s early exposure to Socialist Realism, Rauch’s enigmatic pictorial narratives never vanish into explanation: “My paintings have something vital about them, like an animal, a living thing,” he says. “You don’t have to understand them, just to feel that this creation, to the greatest possible extent, is at peace with itself.” Following major solo exhibitions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2007), the Pinakothek in Munich (2010) and the Leipzig Museum of Art (2010), this new major Rauch monograph accompanies an exhibition at Bozar Expo in Brussels, and provides the most up-to-date overview of his accomplishment.
The best-known exponent of the Leipzig school of painting, Neo Rauch (born 1960) was born, reared and trained as an artist in Leipzig, where he continues to live. In August 2005, Rauch was awarded the chair of painting at Leipzig University. In 2010, he received a major museum retrospective, held jointly at the Leipzig Museum of Art and the Pinakothek. In 2011, a selection of the works from this retrospective then traveled to the Zach?eta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Neo Rauch: The Graphic Work, 1993-2012

Foreword by Kerstin Wahala. Text by Rudij Bergmann. Interview by Wolfgang Büscher.
Published by Hatje Cantz

One of today’s best-known contemporary artists, New Leipzig School painter Neo Rauch (born 1960) blends the realistic figuration of Social Realism with Surrealism: brightly colored figures parade through upended environments, and multiple historical periods overlap in a single work. Most recognized for his paintings and drawings, Rauch has also created an impressive output of printed works over the past two decades, which visit the same themes as the rest of his output, and in Rauch’s own words “are accessories to my painting.” This publication presents the artist’s complete oeuvre of prints from 1993 to today, and celebrates Rauch’s gift of an edition of each of his prints to the town of Aschersleben in Germany, where he was raised. The collection will form the basis of a new art foundation and exhibition space, established in the artist’s name.
Neo Rauch (born 1960) was born, reared and trained as an artist in Leipzig, where he continues to live. In August 2005, Rauch was awarded the chair of painting at Leipzig University.

Neo Rauch: Paintings

Edited by Hans-Werner Schmidt, Bernhart Schwenk.
Published by Hatje Cantz

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the artist Neo Rauch was 30 years old, living in his East German hometown of Leipzig and just beginning to exhibit his paintings. It was the perfect moment for a painter who had been reared on Social Realism to gain access to art outside East Germany, to receive its influences into his art and to emerge onto the stage of world art as a star. At first closely identified with the generation of painters known as the Leipzig School, in recent years Rauch's wonderfully bizarre blend of Social Realism (not exactly a widely-mined style in contemporary art) with de Chirico or Stanley Spencer has come to be seen as a painterly barometer of post-Communist Europe. "Post-Communist Surrealism" could therefore be one way to describe the look of his canvases, which convey narrative intent--men and women from various historical eras performing obscure tasks in uniform, or midway through some ominous occasion--shifting styles several times within the same picture, but always displaying a lush brushwork. Rauch has established a particularly strong audience in the U.S., having been championed by The New York Times' Roberta Smith as the painter of the zeitgeist. Marking Rauch's fiftieth birthday and a simultaneous retrospective in Leipzig and Munich featuring works dating from 1982 to early 2010, this monograph is the most substantial appraisal of his work published to date. In it, his friends and colleagues supply testimonies, among them Luc Tuymans, Jonathan Meese and Michaël Borremans. Alongside essays by critics and historians, Timm Rautert provides a photographic portrait of Rauch's studio.
Neo Rauch (born 1960) was born, reared and trained as an artist in Leipzig, where he continues to live. In August 2005, Rauch was awarded the chair of painting at Leipzig University.

Neo Rauch: Para

Text by Werner Spies, Gary Tinterow.
Published by DuMont Buchverlag

Neo Rauch combines real, narrated and dreamt elements in his paintings, populating them with figures that are connected to each other spatially, but which remain remote in their relationships, and weaving the whole into an uneasy portrait of contemporary society. Para presents works created expressly for Rauch's 2007 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, alongside various writings exploring the reception of Rauch's paintings, plus an overview of his works from the last ten years.

Neo Rauch: Neue Rollen

Paintings 1993-2006

Forword by Markus Brüderlin. Text by Gottfried Boehm, Gernot Boehme, Wolfgang Büscher, Holger Broeker, Markus Brüderlin, Harald Kunde, Donald Kuspit.
Published by Dumont Buchverlag

In a lakeside scene, a man leans on a graphic of an arrow as if it were a rake handle in the garden; tentacles rise from the shoreline and rectangular speech bubbles hang empty in the yellow sky. In a Dali-esque interior, the corner of a comforter drips off a bed. This major new overview of the work of the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch makes, once again, the case that he is one of the most important artists of his generation. He remains committed to putting brush on canvas in an age when digital media are gaining ground, and among a crowd of similarly dedicated colleagues, he stands out at the forefront. While his work of the 1980s was influenced by Expressionism, his more recent portfolio revels in a new take on Socialist Realism, clearly shaped by the experience of growing up in the former East Germany. Rauch riffs on the once-mandated styles of his youth and on western abstraction from the second half of the twentieth century, all in coloration and figuration that directly allude to the Socialist past. Between cartoon styling and historic technique, he has found a distinctive style, palette and concept. These dreamlike sequences feel both timeless and deeply rooted: Rauch gathers figures from the past in surreal landscapes and interiors to tell enigmatic stories about the present.

Neo Rauch: Works Paper 2003-2004

Essay by Harald Kunde.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

Art critic Rudij Bergmann has written that “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.

Neo Rauch

Artwork by Neo Rauch. Text by Harald Szeemann, Daniel Birnbaum, Lynne Cooke.
Published by Hatje Cantz Publishers

One of the most original artists of his generation, Neo Rauch's paintings appear disturbingly detached and yet familiar, their figures, objects, and mood seemingly borrowed from old advertising posters, dusty book jackets, and forgotten comics. Rauch's formulistic visual symbols suggest a more profound meaning, yet it is difficult to decipher their message. The tension lurking under their almost frozen surfaces, washed with dusky, sinister colors, is fueled by paradox: as vivid as the structure of the work comes across, the impression is rigid; as powerful as the strokes of broken colors are, they appear faded, from bygone times.