Neo Rauch

David Zwirner, New York

Hauser & Wirth, Zurich

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2000

New York, David Zwirner, Neo Rauch, February - March 2000

Leipzig, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst; Munich, Haus der Kunst; and Zurich, Kunsthalle Zürich, Neo Rauch: Randgebiet, December 2000 - August 2001, p. 107, illustrated in colour; and p. 141, illustrated 

Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Monumente der Melocholie, March - June 2003

Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gegenwelten: Das 20 Jahrhundert in der Neuen Nationalgalerie, December 2004 - April 2005

Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, The Vincent aan Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe: Neo Rauch, June - October 2002, pp. 111 and 136, illustrated in colour

Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig; and Warsaw, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Neo Rauch: Begleiter, April 2010 - May 2011, p. 102, illustrated in colour (Leipzig); and p. 65, illustrated in colour (Warsaw) 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the yellow tonalities are deeper and richer in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The paintings of Neo Rauch exist in the realm between memory and dream. Deploying a tumult of suggested narrative and signification, Rauch’s work leaves the viewer at once puzzled yet captivated. Heir to a traumatised historical moment, the artist was born in Leipzig in 1960, in which the East German ‘worker atmosphere’ was a long remove from the capitalist West. As exemplified by the present work, references to both past and present coexist in Rauch’s production – a painterly dialogue in which the ethical aesthetic of Socialist Realism is melded with the dreamlike drama of Surrealism. Entitled Moder this work is a dynamic painting that juxtaposes compositional ingenuity with fascinating symbolic portent.  

The painting’s title, Moder, floats in a speech bubble reminiscent of comic strip slogans. Meaning mould, the word ostensibly refers to the growing fungus on the trees that shoot upwards and divide the composition; a pictorial schism that metaphorically alludes to the divided nation of Rauch’s young life. In the foreground, a man with an axe in hand looks as though he is about to chop down the overgrown trees that twist and dominate the composition; a symbolic act that would perhaps affect a new unified state. However, this protagonist and the second figure adjacent to him, appear despondent and absent minded, their facial expressions seem almost paralysed, far removed from the tasks we assume they are meant to be performing. As such, Rauch’s paintings operate in an imaginary realm: organic and winding tree trunks snake through the canvas, while a Brancusi-esque space rocket dominates the left side of the painting. Rauch establishes sets of dichotomies that exist in the same pictorial universe: scientific progress is met with anachronistic labour, while organic overgrowth is met with the concrete and manmade. Furthermore, the ‘melting’ car tyres further confound the viewer’s sense of narrative perception and could be a reference to Salvador Dalí’s paintings, in which clocks hang on trees and melt away into a desert landscape.

Having studied at the esteemed Art Academy in Leipzig during the early 1990s, Rauch received a formal arts education that prioritised drawing from the model, mastering the rules of perspective, and analysing composition. This traditional discipline is abundantly apparent in Moder, in which Rauch demonstrates his skill in painterly lineage, visions of perspective, and ability to create various layers on the flat canvas surface. Although his works formally echo the aesthetic of a collage, he paints freely, spurning photographic sources in favour of those derived from his imagination and memory; an effect that adds to the dream-like, yet realistic, tone of his paintings from the late 1990s. Rauch’s use of colour augments the atmosphere of his work. Oddly off-key and uncannily luminous, this painting is almost sepia-toned apart from the grey background that imparts an industrial feel. Rauch enhances this urban atmosphere via the blue social housing block that rises above the figures’ heads. This architecture perhaps refers to the communist building blocks that dominated East German cityscapes and appears out of kilter considering the presence of a towering modernist rocket-like structure that conjures allusions to the Cold War space race. By conflating and subverting pictorial elements and political referents, Moder deliberately overturns the viewer’s preconceptions. The fact that Moder literally means mould is a subtle but straight forward message that unabashedly refers to an obsolete world haunted by historical trauma.