Neo Rauch

Eigen & Art, Berlin/ Leipzig
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1999

Colour: The colours in the catalouge illustration are fairly accurate, although the black areas are slightly brighter and the yellows are slightly deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a small loss towards the centre of the top edge, visible in the catalogue illustration, and two very small spots of paint lifting towards the top right corner. Close inspection reveals two horizontal areas of paint shrinkage, inherent to the artist's method and medium towards the right of the centre of the composition, visible in the catalogue illustration. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"With a shudder I open the various contamination chambers and remove a variety of material from them to temporarily store it in the territories of my paintings" (the artist cited in conversation with Juan Manuel Bonet, Exhibition Catalogue, Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Neo Rauch, 2005, p. 76).

Among the intense deep crimson and shades of velvety blacks in Neo Rauch's beautiful 1998 painting Notte, shadows of spontaneous brushwork catalogue the directness of the artist's technique. The legible adjustments in impasto paint layers belie a repetitive process of description and erasure, showing how composition was reworked on the canvas. This also acts as a transparent archaeology of the painting's history as process becomes a metaphor for historical change.

The vibrant tonal contrasts in this work reveal Rauch's practice of working one colour over another and occasionally scoring into the thick paint layer with a point to emphasise the graphic lineation. The blurring of scored ridges indicates that this was executed into a virtually dry oil paint layer. While proclaiming an independent, idiosyncratic painterly process, Notte's graphic schema is also reminiscent of the absolute tonal duality and limited linearity of woodblock prints, emblematised by Rauch's German Expressionist predecessors.

Born in Leipzig in 1960, Rauch grew up in the controlled society of East Germany and the oppressive claustrophobia of the pitch black atmosphere of Notte evokes the constraints of a policed state, while the fact that the illumination of the lights is highly selective also finds metaphorical parallels with notions of selection and censorship, which were of course so core to the struggle of artists living in the Soviet block. Rauch possesses an exceptional facility to allegorize the biography of his nation, and this painting captures the hesitant psychology of a post-communist 1990s with brilliant cogency via stunning pictorial means.