Two things are immediately apparent when you look at the art of Neo Rauch: his technical skills are virtuosic and the paintings are consistently enigmatic. Visually, there is much to see. The paintings and large drawings are activity-laden; every character in his compositions is doing something, the kind of work that moves objects around but to no evident purpose and with no apparent outcome. Structures get built, costumes are put on, men and women pay rapt attention to what they are doing. But for the viewer nothing adds up to anything that could be declared a readable narrative. "Der Stammbaum/Family Tree", 2017, is a large oil on paper drawing that was included in “Neo Rauch: Aus Dem Boden/ From the Floor” at The Drawing Center in New York from April 11 to July 28 of this year. The title seems to allude to a confusing ceremony in which a single tree is being planted by a man dressed in red clothes, as is a couple who are holding red containers that might contain water, or might be shopping bags. Or, as a way of extending the meaning of the eponymous title, they could be members of a genealogical family tree. The shadows their bodies project onto the ground are swirling, dwarfish shapes, like contorted puddles. The planting in which they are participants takes place in a public space dominated by an odd piece of sculpture that draws the attention of four darkly dressed figures. A fifth figure looks back at us. He could be one of the picnicking men in Manet’s "Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe", 1863, except the situation we find him in is no frolic. Rauch is open to what he has elsewhere described as “the desire for risky encounters,” and his inclination is to stage disruptions in the work; the degree of that disruption can be everything from “a fine fracture” to “an act of violence.” "Der Stammbaum" is a measure of the former; "Sperre/Barrier", 2018, presents something of the latter. The painting includes a captive giraffe, an orator who stands on a wooden crate that is comprised of a roil of snakes, and a woman who is about to cast down a flag, with Old Testament zeal, on a hybrid man/snake whose world-weariness makes him a perfect victim. The colour of the flags the woman holds matches the edges of the wooden X-shaped barrier above him. In other paintings by Rauch this assembly becomes a surrogate crucifix, waiting for a man or a snake, or both.
This is conjecture; as viewers we are always in the position of trying to piece together a narrative that remains allusive. Rauch says in the following interview that he is on the lookout “for kaleidoscopic messages from the depths of my subconscious,” and he suggests that his imagination can best be characterized by the mycelium, the widely branched, underground mushroom. For him, “everything is connected.” Below the surface his mind forms “strange patterns and at crucial moments the compressed materials break through the crust and manifest themselves as forms.” He says that “a good picture should be timeless, suggestive and peculiar.” Using this definition, he makes very good pictures, indeed.
Rauch’s paintings and drawings always involve a story, but they don’t make available any of the conventional ways that we have come to understand what that story is. In a painting called "Vater/Father", 2007, a vaguely melancholic man, tidily dressed and holding in his arms a small-scale human being, stares off into space, while another man takes pictures with a small 35 mm camera. There are other paraphernalia on a table in the foreground: a vase, an armour breastplate, a cluster of four small votive candles and a meringue dessert. Beyond the foregrounded table is another table on which sit plated pie slices, and above them are four ornate letters that spell out the name of the exhibition: “para.” What is most peculiar is that while the three men appear to be the same age, they are all different sizes. The most conspicuous thing about the largest figure—presumably the father of the title—is that he wears a pair of ridiculous, cartoony yellow rubber gloves. He looks to be a compromised caregiver in the same way that the painter in "Parabel", 2007, who also wears floppy gloves, will have considerable difficulty in painting the way he wishes he could. Rauch suggests that the figure in the painting is a self-portrait whose specific condition says something about the life of the painter generally. “It is quite obvious,” Rauch says with absolute conviction, “that this calamity turns into a metaphor for a permanent dissatisfaction with the painterly process.”
Neo Rauch was born on April 18, 1960, in Leipzig, where he still lives. He is the best-known member of the New Leipzig School, a contested name assigned to a group of painters who studied at the Leipzig Art Academy, the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, in the late 1990s and who have since come to international prominence. He is represented by the David Zwirner Gallery in New York and by Galerie EIGEN + ART in Leipzig/Berlin.
Neo Rauch responded to a series of emailed questions on July 22, 2019.
BORDER CROSSINGS: In an interview in 2007 you talked about how pictures get made and you said you reach a point where you give the painting “the freedom to demand the addition of particular building blocks.” This is what a lot of writers I have interviewed say, that at a certain point the story or the novel starts writing itself. Does your painting, similarly, start painting itself?
NEO RAUCH: Yes, at a certain point I take a step back and follow the directions of the painting and try to fulfill its demands in a diligent manner.