Neo Rauch: Renegaten

Educated at the now legendary Leipzig Academy by the old school of Social Realist painters, Neo Rauch has become one of the Academy s most influential graduates. His fusion of industrial symbolism, painterly figuration, and unique brand of Neo-Romanticism are influenced in part by his exposure to Communist-era advertising in former East Germany. In his words, this atmosphere of permanent fear had a lasting effect on his work. The paradoxical combination of proletarian ethic and stoic inactivity give Rauch s paintings the quality of being frozen in another time. In many of his compositions, athletic figures engaged in manual labor work against a backdrop of architectural elements, futuristic (yet also oddly old-fashioned) industrial devices, and barren landscapes. In a series of vignettes, characters are introduced and their tasks defined by props, among them tools, books, hoses and other recognizable objects. More ambiguous images also populate these spaces, pushing the narrative into less familiar territory. Each element, whether cartoon-like or realistically rendered, is deftly balanced by political and visual authenticity; the artist s technical ability and sincere connection to his vernacular are ever apparent. Rauch s fascination with the figure and work-related props allow for a formal exploration, based in part on the properties of paint itself. A glob of paint draped over an arm, for example, or a rake dragged through a patch of grass, leave behind marks and swirls that blur the line between rendered object and reference to the simplicity and necessity of the artist s materials. It is as if the figures enable, or are perhaps in a state of reacting to, their own painted environments. In Lösung (2005), a series of events unfolds around the exposed window of a flat-roofed home in the country. A couple wrestles behind a partially drawn curtain, while three simultaneous events occur against a brooding sky and the impossible perspective of an enlarged terra