Orphaned Since Infancy, the German Painter Follows in His Artist Parents' Footsteps
When the German painter Neo Rauch was six weeks old, his parents left him with his grandparents and boarded a train to art school in Leipzig.
Within hours, the train had crashed, and their infant son was orphaned. Surrounded by their charcoal drawings, his earliest impulse was to create art.
"The artwork of my parents encircled me," said Mr. Rauch, now 54 years old, at his Leipzig studio. On the wall, a photograph of his mother watches over him, unable to answer a question that has always puzzled him: "How did they even pick 'Neo' as my name?"
His first work, at age 2, was a cheery woodpecker. Half a century later, he is best known for large-scale renderings of his daydreams.
Sixteen of these paintings and one etching appear in "At the Well," a solo exhibition opening Thursday at David Zwirner Gallery, part of Mr. Rauch's efforts to make himself better known in New York and outside Europe after a 2007 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The enigmatic, 10-by-8-foot painting "At the Well" portrays a conversation between a towering man in a World War II-era helmet, another man riding a horse bareback, and a woman in a purple dress. Nearby, an elderly beggar and a man wearing a goldenrod suit and top hat watch. The depiction is given a menacing tone through storm clouds and a naked, androgynous figure lurking in the background on a pedestal, its face obscured by a black mask.
Landscapes are usually the only realistic elements in Mr. Rauch's works, often modeled on the Aschersleben countryside where he grew up. The disproportionate sizes of his figures is intentional, a consequence, he said, of avoiding models, reference points or advance sketches on canvas.
"That doesn't mollify me," he said. "Doing that would lead to something that amazed the canvas, but I wouldn't have full ownership of the idea."