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Lot Essay
Drawing upon archives that are both personal and cultural, Neo Rauch’s elaborate compositions investigate narrative structure and the nature of images in the postmodern era. Heilstätten delivers a complex construction of interspliced scenes in the artist’s exacting approach to figurative painting. Completed the year after his first museum retrospective, which was held jointly at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the present example is a testament to Rauch’s ability to elicit a measure of unease and nostalgia from visual juxtapositions. Translated from German, the title reads ‘Sanatoriums’, which imbues the evocative tableaux with a subtle theme. “Coming up with the title is often an arduous process,” the artist notes, “because my interest in the etymological roots of even the most banal expression leads me to sediments of meaning that occasionally send unexpected impetus to painterly intentions” (N. Rauch, quoted in Neo Rauch: Neue Rollen. Paintings 1993-2006, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg 2006, p. 70). By balancing careful meditation with surprising visual relationships, Rauch creates an enthralling oeuvre that continues to expand.
Heilstätten brings multiple scenes together into a fragmented narrative; multiple perspectives create an uncanny scene that alludes to something larger. Interiors meld with exteriors as small figures go about their lives in this surreal setting where the boundaries of one panel slowly blur into the others. A large man in a violet shirt can be seen at multiple points throughout the composition walking, being carried, and standing outside a building. This repetition links each scene together visually but does not completely illuminate Rauch’s plot. “Inexplicable zones are necessary,” says Rauch, “because otherwise the image will dry out, because it will become completely disinfected. I have to keep on deciding at which point in the process of making a painting I have to make that cut and put in fields of interference. That always happens when the feeling arises that the spelled-out parts have taken the upper hand” (N. Rauch, quoted in H. Liebs, “Nothing Embarrasses me Now,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 13, 2006, p. 18). The green trees, red and yellow buildings, and the cloudy gray skies all seem to be of this earth, but their arrangement and stylization impart both a nostalgic and otherworldly air.
A master of appropriative techniques, Rauch mines the archive of visual culture and combines it with his own memories and imagination. Reference points from art history, consumer ephemera, and the real world all collide upon his canvas to create something that is oddly familiar but just beyond our reach. As the artist explains, “I refrain both from any hierarchization and from a conscious evaluation of my pictorial inventory. This means that elements like Balthus, Vermeer, Tintin, Donald Judd, Donald Duck, agitprop, and cheap advertising garbage can flow together in a furrow of my childhood landscape and generate an intermingled conglomerate of surprising plausibility” (N. Rauch, quoted in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Neo Rauch, Cologne 2012, p. 148). Combining seemingly disparate references in his dense canvases, Rauch creates a push and pull that guides the viewer into his constructed microcosms.
One of the principal artists associated with the New Leipzig School, Rauch studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig before the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the reunification, the artist traveled outside of the Iron Curtain for the first time and came into contact with the masterworks of Western art history. In particular, the proto-Renaissance works of Giotto struck a chord with their Medieval disregard for illusionistic space combined with new ideas about figuration. Thinking back to this revelation, Rauch recalls that “at this turning point I became the artist I am” (N. Rauch, quoted in T. Loader Wilkinson, “Interview: Artist Neo Rauch,” Billionaire, June 2019).
Bringing in myriad references to canvases like Heilstätten, the painter merges those early Italian sensibilities with the social realist artwork of his childhood and Surrealist tendencies like those of Salvador Dali. Though often hesitant to fully align with Surrealism, Rauch’s working process borrows some of that movement’s ideals and leaves certain elements to chance. Instead of biomorphic shapes and automatic drawing, the artist pulls full scenes and memories from his mind and sets them upon the canvas to interact with each other. Establishing a loose framework, his references and iconography begin to play with each other. As he has stated in the past, “Having set the fundamentals, the stage, I introduce the actors on the stage. Then it happens - when I set the inhabitants into a relation, I am not able to plan. In between the figures, and in between the figures and me, subtle relations start to be created. A microclimate comes into being” (N. Rauch, quoted in A. Lubov, “The New Leipzig School,” in Neo Rauch: para, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art., New York, 2007, p. 69). Each painting is a contained world in which inexplicable and often secretive connections are being made. It is this disquieting tension that is felt immediately when viewing works like Heilstätten.
Heilstätten brings multiple scenes together into a fragmented narrative; multiple perspectives create an uncanny scene that alludes to something larger. Interiors meld with exteriors as small figures go about their lives in this surreal setting where the boundaries of one panel slowly blur into the others. A large man in a violet shirt can be seen at multiple points throughout the composition walking, being carried, and standing outside a building. This repetition links each scene together visually but does not completely illuminate Rauch’s plot. “Inexplicable zones are necessary,” says Rauch, “because otherwise the image will dry out, because it will become completely disinfected. I have to keep on deciding at which point in the process of making a painting I have to make that cut and put in fields of interference. That always happens when the feeling arises that the spelled-out parts have taken the upper hand” (N. Rauch, quoted in H. Liebs, “Nothing Embarrasses me Now,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 13, 2006, p. 18). The green trees, red and yellow buildings, and the cloudy gray skies all seem to be of this earth, but their arrangement and stylization impart both a nostalgic and otherworldly air.
A master of appropriative techniques, Rauch mines the archive of visual culture and combines it with his own memories and imagination. Reference points from art history, consumer ephemera, and the real world all collide upon his canvas to create something that is oddly familiar but just beyond our reach. As the artist explains, “I refrain both from any hierarchization and from a conscious evaluation of my pictorial inventory. This means that elements like Balthus, Vermeer, Tintin, Donald Judd, Donald Duck, agitprop, and cheap advertising garbage can flow together in a furrow of my childhood landscape and generate an intermingled conglomerate of surprising plausibility” (N. Rauch, quoted in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Neo Rauch, Cologne 2012, p. 148). Combining seemingly disparate references in his dense canvases, Rauch creates a push and pull that guides the viewer into his constructed microcosms.
One of the principal artists associated with the New Leipzig School, Rauch studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig before the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the reunification, the artist traveled outside of the Iron Curtain for the first time and came into contact with the masterworks of Western art history. In particular, the proto-Renaissance works of Giotto struck a chord with their Medieval disregard for illusionistic space combined with new ideas about figuration. Thinking back to this revelation, Rauch recalls that “at this turning point I became the artist I am” (N. Rauch, quoted in T. Loader Wilkinson, “Interview: Artist Neo Rauch,” Billionaire, June 2019).
Bringing in myriad references to canvases like Heilstätten, the painter merges those early Italian sensibilities with the social realist artwork of his childhood and Surrealist tendencies like those of Salvador Dali. Though often hesitant to fully align with Surrealism, Rauch’s working process borrows some of that movement’s ideals and leaves certain elements to chance. Instead of biomorphic shapes and automatic drawing, the artist pulls full scenes and memories from his mind and sets them upon the canvas to interact with each other. Establishing a loose framework, his references and iconography begin to play with each other. As he has stated in the past, “Having set the fundamentals, the stage, I introduce the actors on the stage. Then it happens - when I set the inhabitants into a relation, I am not able to plan. In between the figures, and in between the figures and me, subtle relations start to be created. A microclimate comes into being” (N. Rauch, quoted in A. Lubov, “The New Leipzig School,” in Neo Rauch: para, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art., New York, 2007, p. 69). Each painting is a contained world in which inexplicable and often secretive connections are being made. It is this disquieting tension that is felt immediately when viewing works like Heilstätten.