RAUCH, NEO
1960 Leipzig

Title: "Los".
Date: 1999.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 100 x 70 cm.
Notation: Titled within the diagram lower left: Lo.
Frame: Framed.



Provenance:
- - Galerie Eigen + Art, Berlin/Leipzig (label)

- Private collection, Sydney (ca. 2000)

- Achenbach Art Consulting, Düsseldorf

- Private collection, Austria (according to the consignor, acquired from the previous owner in 2012)


Exhibition:
- Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leipzig 2000

- Haus der Kunst, Munich 2001

- Kunsthalle Zürich, 2001


Literature:
´- Exhib. cat. Randgebiet, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leipzig/Haus der Kunst, Munich/Kunsthalle Zürich, 2000/01, cat. no. 76, ill.



- Characteristic work comprising heterogeneous pictorial elements in the graphic style of screen printing or comics

- Allusive interweaving of motifs from different contexts

- A compelling narrative without a clear plot



Avoiding “Philosophical Kitsch”

Neo Rauch is regarded as one of the principal representatives of the New Leipzig School. Following German reunification, this movement established itself through a return to figurative painting, standing in deliberate contrast to the dominant abstract tendencies of the time. The Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig played a formative role in shaping the technical mastery characteristic of its painters.

The accomplished use of various techniques to introduce estranging elements into the composition also defines Neo Rauch’s artistic practice. Through the incorporation of historical visual quotations and heterogeneous fragments—whose linear, graphic mode of representation evokes silkscreen printing or comics—Rauch constructs a private iconography filled with suggestive references. In order to avoid “illustrative embarrassment and, let’s say, philosophical kitsch, spiritual kitsch,” the artist employs “elements of advertising graphics and perhaps also comics. I try, in this way, to bring things a little into balance. In my striving for mediation, for equilibrium, I place the greatest value on ensuring that alongside the quite conceptual bricolage from which the pictures emerge, painting itself is also given room, at the right moment, to unfold.”

(Neo Rauch, quoted in Neo Rauch – Marineschule, exh. cat., Overbeck-Gesellschaft Lübeck; Leipzig, 1995, p. 8).



Narrative Ambiguity

This bringing together of disparate pictorial elements—and the resulting incongruity on the level of content—also characterizes the present work. Executed in a reduced palette limited to red and green on a white ground, the composition presents a stage-like tableau.

The tall opening in a wall clad with square panels resembles a gateway, although the reveal still bears traces of a shattered glass window, fragments of which continue across the shards scattered on the ground. Yet the sharply angular contour takes on a life of its own, intruding into the space as a stylized jagged line that surrounds the scene with flashes, charging it with an atmosphere of electricity.

In the foreground, beneath an arrow-shaped sign pointing downward into the space behind and bearing the word “Halt,” stands an overgrown red gasoline pump, its hose and nozzle detached from their holder and lying on the floor. At the base of the pump appears the word “Los” (“Go”), framed in green and reminiscent of the starting square of a board game.

Two disproportionately large figures dominate the scene, each equipped with what appears to be a baseball bat—or perhaps a club?—and caught in the midst of an exaggerated swinging motion. Their identities remain unclear, as does the meaning of their frozen poses: are they preparing for a sporting strike or a violent blow? Like the gasoline pump and an overturned tree—toward which the nozzle points almost accusingly like a finger—they appear mounted upon the ground like game pieces on a playing surface.

Surrounding the two protagonists are scattered secondary figures who populate the pictorial space like extras or incidental passersby. One man carries a briefcase, while another, head thrown back, gazes upward at a towering surface—perhaps a museum visitor contemplating a painting? Neither connected through interaction nor united by shared action, the figures remain isolated within their individual pursuits. Their uncertain motivations heighten the narrative ambiguity. Yet the entire cast of the painting appears trapped between the contradictory imperatives of “Go” and “Stop.”



Shifting and Displacing

If one remains within the metaphor of the board game, Rauch treats the canvas as a playing field. His displacement of figures originating from different temporal and spatial contexts follows a dreamlike narrative structure, producing a collage-like and fragmented whole distinguished by subjectively charged allusions.

“One can get the impression that the painting is merely one possibility of arranging the inventory—that the elements could also be shifted around. Not that the composition is casual, but the material itself, at least as I like it, suggests the desire to grasp and move things, also in the sense of Ver-rücktheit [madness/displacement].”

(Neo Rauch, quoted in Thomas E. Schmidt, “Plötzlich in Nebenwelten geraten. Ein Gespräch mit dem Leipziger Maler Neo Rauch – über Heimat, die Tradition und das Überleben im Kunstbetrieb,” Die Zeit, no. 50, 2001).

Bettina Haiss



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#Neo Rauch #New Leipzig School #Germany #Contemporary Art #Painting #Group of Figures #1990s #Post War.







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