“Rauch’s paintings possess an incongruous punch quite different from that of works by East German artists who fled to the West before reunification...But for all his skilled command, more than a touch of farcical camp attends his May Day romps—a seriousness that resists being taken seriously."
At the intersection of personal and national history, Neo Rauch’s Zoll exhibits the artist’s complex and elusive visual language grounded in an ever-colliding vocabulary of Socialist Realism, German Romanticism, and Surrealism. Through such an amalgamation, dreamscapes – equally horrifying and intriguing – occupy the core of the artist’s highly unique pictorial expression, and a profound sense of German-ness pervades his compositions; they are in equal parts critical, complicated, and nostalgic. Rauch’s characteristic employment of saturated, industrial colors, acute realism, and ambiguous narrative elements are central to Zoll, which displays customs officers sifting through the questionable luggage of a young couple. The scene is both eerie and captivating, forming part of Rauch’s eccentric iconography with characters who “seem impassibly resigned to playing the role he assigns them, the viewer is invaded by indescribably yet strangely familiar feelings of unease. These are feelings which we once believed erased once and for all, feelings similar to the idea of loss which induce us to a profound state of melancholy.” (Fernando Francés in: Exh. Cat., Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Neo Rauch, 2005, p. 9) Executed on an immersive scale, Zoll enthralls with exquisite form and painterly application, seemingly existing in the realm between memory and dream.
Rauch’s paintings stand among the most unusual and enigmatic depictions produced over the past two decades. His fascinating, colorful, and disquieting compositions enter into a world that is at once mythic, intimate, and surreal. Born in Leipzig in 1960, he was completely surrounded by the controlled market economy of East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell at the end of 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later. As such, his work is fettered with references to the communist history of East Germany, the subsequent influx of capitalism, and the polar aesthetic of these two cultures. As with many of the most important artistic movements over the centuries, yet again a profound uplifting of civilization and a clash of historical ideals laid the seeds for an artistic movement which Rauch has pioneered, the so-called Leipziger Schule or Leipzig School.
Market Precedent: Neo Rauch
The towering presence and perspectival expanse of Zoll represents one of Rauch’s finest paintings to date. Although the specter of his East German childhood is consistently present in this painting, Rauch does not present historical facts or clear-cut narratives. Rather, he uses the genre of painting to process these experiences, creating ambiguous scenes that deny easy recourse to established meaning. Indeed, Rauch’s embrace of Social-Realist tradition and figuration reveals visual narratives akin to socialist propaganda posters. Here, towering industrial structures, perhaps in reference to the communist building blocks that dominated East German cityscapes, serve as the backdrop for a curious investigation of personal belongings as customs officers inspect luggage overflowing with human bones and stalagmite-like rock formations. The scene is juxtaposed by a sunset illuminating a densely packed forest, a visual emblem of German Romanticism, while elongated chimneys extend far into the sky in a pattern akin to musical instruction. As Robert Hobbs has observed of Rauch’s work: “Neither surreal or hyper-real, this art is remarkable for its interplays of types and conventions as well as its ricocheting references that circulate both inside and outside it to discern the confounding and questionable role that the many layers of the past can potentially play in the creation of the present and the future.” (Robert Hobbs, ‘Neo Rauch’s Purposive Ambiguities’ in: Exh. Cat., Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Neo Rauch, 2005, p. 83)
"Cryptic and enigmatic in relation to cause, purpose and ambition, [Rauch's work] cleaves a precarious path between the twin dangers of nostalgia for a lost idyll, an edenic world of social unity and communality, and a blanket condemnation of present conditions as riddled by anomie and despair, moral, social and psychological."
Every stage of Rauch’s narrative elicits a question which ultimately points not towards progress but towards stasis and futility, a world of images seemingly arbitrary. Yet, a closer look at his intriguing juxtaposition will reveal that the painter has created his own powerful glossary, an idiom that is at once clearly visible yet impossible to fully grasp. Zoll embodies this collects ion of ciphers and quotations of the biographical and the historical that ultimately coalesce to form an unfathomable puzzle.
While Rauch is widely celebrated in Leipzig, his work transcends the intellectual sphere of his native city, as well as that of Germany. Zoll is a momentous work within Rauch’s coherent yet vast oeuvre, exhibiting the artist’s ultimate prowess with a brush, as well as his fascination with the contemporary psyche and its negotiation of a turbulent, troubled past. Encompassing the inscrutable surrealist mood, inspiration from propaganda images, and the rendering of an evidently realistic scene, Zoll powerfully illustrates the phantasmagorical repertoire that has earned Neo Rauch his status as one of the most original artists of his generation.
