Exceptional Works: Neo Rauch

“A painting is a living organism which grabs what it needs. From a certain moment of working on a painting, it will take over and paint itself through me.”

—Neo Rauch

Rauch in his studio, Leipzig, 2021. Photo by Uwe Walter. © Uwe Walter, 2021

German artist Neo Rauch (b. 1960) is widely celebrated for his visually captivating compositions that are characterized by their distinctive combination of figurative imagery and surrealist abstraction. His enigmatic compositions employ an eccentric iconography of human characters, animals, and hybrid forms within familiar-seeming but imaginary settings. The present work, Lösung (2005), is featured on the occasion of the gallery's presentation at Art Basel 2023.

Neo Rauch

Lösung, 2005

Oil on canvas

118 1/8 x 82 5/8 inches (300 x 210 cm)
Framed: 120 1/8 x 84 5/8 inches (305 x 215 cm)

Inquire

In Lösung, which translates as “solution,” Rauch depicts four pairs of figures engaging in various activities inside and surrounding a flat-roofed home in a suburban landscape. Each pair is dressed in matching uniforms that evoke both athletic and historical associations, and a similar pattern of domination and submission appears to unfold across the scene. One’s attention is drawn to a bare-chested elderly man in a red knee-length skirt and high black boots, who holds a white, serpent-like creature at arm’s length—the word “Lösung” is inscribed along its spine.

Writer Nico Israel describes this scene in Lösung: “Outside, a group of anachronistic figures float under a twilit sky suggestive of Caspar David Friedrich. One is a youngish man in a sports jersey apparently taking a walk, arms behind his back. Flanking him on one side is an ancient, Moses-like figure, bare-chested, wearing a primitive skirt or loincloth with knee-high leather boots, and holding a white snake or spinal column.

Israel continues, “behind the heavily draped window of a squat modern house in the country, a couple embraces or wrestles awkwardly.… On the other side, an older-looking version of the sportsman squats with hands tied behind back awaiting execution from a soldier or magistrate in Napoleonic-era clothing, who nonchalantly holds a gun to the prisoner’s head.”

“Typical of Rauch’s work, this composition creates an inextricable web of references, cross-references, and resurgences.”

—Réal Lussier, curator of Neo Rauch, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

Laocoön and His Sons, c. 40–20 BCE, Vatican Museums, Rome

The man, the writhing form, and even the ambiguous title call to mind Laocoön, the tragic figure from Greek mythology. Immortalized in a classical sculpture famously rediscovered during the Renaissance, Laocoön was a Trojan priest who, along with his sons, was attacked by serpents sent by the gods after attempting to warn his countrymen about the threat of the Trojan Horse.

In Rauch's painting, one man is kept on a leash. Behind them, in the shadow of the building, a kneeling figure is being observed by a military officer holding a gun, while underground, beneath an enlarged railing, a woman sits beside a collapsed man next to a handsaw. Exposed through the draped window of the house is the fourth couple, seemingly wrestling.

As in much of Rauch’s oeuvre, the mysterious narrative appears to defy natural law, instead hinting at coexisting temporalities and transferrable identities. As writer Nico Israel observes of this painting, it “offers no readily discernible key to its own allegoricalness: Narrative fragments circulate without a punctum; distinctions between present, near past, and distant past seem flattened; scales shift. Yet while there is no homogeneously conceived historicism in Lösung, no 'solution' to the paradoxes of power and powerlessness it evokes, history—meaning a sense of connection to the past, of living as part of a project, even a failed project—courses through every stroke.”

Installation view, Neo Rauch: Renegaten, David Zwirner, New York, 2005

Installation view, Neo Rauch, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2006

Of this detail in the painting, Israel writes, “In the bottom quarter of the canvas, behind a puke green iron-lattice railing that seems spatially disconnected from the rest of the scene, sits a modern-looking woman who appears to have discovered a lumpy dead body, beside which a saw—one of many unused bits of equipment in these paintings (reminiscent of Dürer’s Melancholia etchings, 1513–1514)—leans against a wall.”

Neo Rauch, Lösung, 2005 (detail)

“[Rauch's paintings are] still-lifes, symbols of picture-making; he creates, as it were, an emblemology of painting. To experience his [canvases] thus, the observer must free himself or herself from the compulsion to read a story into them, from the urge to decipher their meaning.”

—Bernhart Schwenk, Neo Rauch: Randgebiet

Installation view, Neo Rauch, Lösung, 2005

Browse More Works from Art Basel

Explore Now

Consign with David Zwirner