The parallel universe of Neo Rauch
For the time being, Neo Rauch prefers not to give interviews. “There’s been way too much press lately. I’m afraid to have already thrown the baby out with the bathwater,” the forty-one-year-old painter says over the phone from his spacious studio in a former spinning mill in Leipzig, in what was once East Germany. With a major retrospective currently touring Germany and Switzerland, another show at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and work in this year’s Venice Biennale, Rauch has reason to fear the number-one killer of serious contemporary artists: overexposure.
After enthusiastic reviews, cover stories, and features in fashion magazines, recent articles have begun to target his shooting-star status. Rauch’s production of a limited-edition lamp has been taken by some as an early indication of his imminent sellout, while stories of waiting lists for his paintings—scores of wealthy collectors lining up for their own private Rauchs —aim at further souring the mood.
But what’s the artist to do? His output might not yet have reached that of Picasso, but at almost thirty works of art a year he’s already on par with, say, some painters of the Netherlandish Golden Age. Never one to wait for the muse to wander in, Rauch clocks in early every day for a stringent nine-to-five rendezvous with brushes, paint, and canvas.
Welcome to the peculiar world of Neo Rauch, whose work combines the Socialist Realism of Communist East Germany with the equally ideological Cold War abstraction of the West. Rauch denies, however, that the coming down of the Wall had any formative impact on his art. And why should it have?
In Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties James Joyce is asked what exactly he was doing during the Great War; he sardonically replies, “I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?” Neo Rauch might reply similarly to a comparable question…
The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 86, Summer 2001.
Thomas Girst