"I'm a painter, not an artist".
About the retrospective exhibition "Neo Rauch, le songe de la raison", on view until 15 October at the MO.CO. in Montpellier.
The strange visions of painter Neo Rauch have been on show at Montpellier's MO.CO. since 8 July and will remain there until 15 October. It's as if the disturbing, anxiety-provoking compositions of this artist, born in 1960 in East Germany, a year before the Berlin Wall went up, were echoing a world that is once again in turmoil...
This is the first retrospective in France of the German painter who helped reposition figurative painting in contemporary international artistic discourse, and was one of the leaders of the new Leipzig School. Neo Rauch is now considered to be one of the greatest contemporary German artists, a painter with a mysterious and legendary aura about him. His universal, outsized work has had a profound influence on a generation of European painters, particularly French, who discovered it at the dawn of the new millennium.
"What's wrong with Neo Rauch's works of art?" asks Elisabeth Couturier in her article for Connaissances des arts. "His figurative compositions, executed with a master's hand, resist the finest interpretations even though they show a host of events, figures and things. They capture our attention irresistibly, but draw us into dizzying speculations that lead down blind alleys. A certain unease sets in. Where do these strange characters from different eras come from, carrying out bizarre, seemingly pointless actions against a backdrop of obsolete industrial estates or drab mountain landscapes? Why do they rub shoulders with animals with human heads, giant beetles and hybrid creatures?
Marked by his artistic apprenticeship in East Germany, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and associated with the international emergence of the new Leipzig School, Neo Rauch has for thirty years been developing a singular body of work, seemingly narrative but resistant to any immediate, docile interpretation. His enigmatic, equivocal paintings require a long look to fully appreciate the complexity of their composition, their play on scale and the abundance of symbols. They weave unexpected links between periods and places, between history and the present, and draw on skilful references to the Italian Renaissance, German Romanticism and Socialist Realism.
Neo Rauch invents a 'dream-like' style of painting that interweaves scenes and allusions, offering the viewer a wide range of open-ended reflections on history, heritage, the power of art, the role of the artist and the impasses of contemporary society.
"Another anomaly," points out Elisabeth Couturier in Connaissance des arts: "a star in his own country, with a worldwide reputation, the German artist is only now enjoying his first solo exhibition in France. "For me", explains Numa Hambursin, curator of the Languedoc region's contemporary art museums, "he's one of today's greatest painters, an absolute reference for many artists. I've had this exhibition in mind for a very long time, but I still needed to have the institutional means to make it happen. He adds that "we are often paralysed when faced with this enigmatic and complex painting, which doesn't take fifteen seconds to look at. Neo Rauch deconstructs spatial reference points, abolishes the sense of proportion and superimposes different narratives. You never know where you stand".
And that's exactly what it is! Unrelated actions share the space of the paintings by Rauch, whose artworks for sale have been managed on the contemporary art market since 1993 by the EIGEN+ART art gallery in Leipzig/Berlin, and by David Zwirner in New York since 2000. In Platz (Square), for example, a painting produced in 2000, two deserted factory buildings appear in the background of three workers straight out of the 1950s. A kind of orang-utan with a human face stands up to a man armed with a stick, a strange shape that could just as easily be painted or erected by another man, while a woman in the foreground on the right, armed with the same stick, seems to be in control of a shapeless, slimy-looking being with a human face too. An improbable, disconcerting ritual. Just like Die Wandlung (The Transformation), dating from 2019. A painting featuring a giant juggler with wings, two monstrous insects with human heads and a musician who could represent the artist himself, whose piano is a computer keyboard...
"In this theatre of the absurd," writes the journalist from Connaissance des arts, "we can spot, among other things, the retro-futuristic imagery of 1950s comic books, heroes from the great historical paintings, ogres and witches from Grimm's fairy tales, as well as Wagner's Valkyries, Kafka's woodlice and Salvator Dali's celibate machines. These are influences that have inevitably left their mark on Neo Rauch's subconscious, especially when, in the early 2000s, he really gave himself free rein by asserting his singularity in relation to the other giants of German painting, such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. "But doesn't he, like them, question the unspeakable?" asks Elisabeth Couturier.
In keeping with the ambition of the event, the exhibition at MO.CO. brings together around a hundred works by the artist, including over forty canvases, many of them of impressive size. Entitled The Dream of Reason, after Goya's engraving El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Dream of Reason produces monsters), from which Neo Rauch sometimes drew inspiration, this retrospective retraces the painter's singular career from the early 1990s to the present day. After a wide-ranging selection of drawings and watercolours from 1990 to 2021, the retrospective unfurls across the three floors of the MO.CO. a series of major canvases borrowed from numerous foreign collectors and museums, never before exhibited in our country. It is accompanied by a superb catalogue, the first publication in France on Neo Rauch, including an interview the artist gave to Hélène Trespeuch, lecturer in the history of contemporary art.
"I don't prepare my paintings: no studies, no sketches, no preparatory drawings," the painter explains to his interviewer. "In my eyes, that would lessen the charm of the adventure I want to experience on the surface of the canvas. I'm usually a person who needs security, but this time I want to take a risk (...). One thing leads to another (...). Creatures obviously want to appear on the canvas. I'm trying to understand what their motives might be for appearing in the painting. But, in any case, they argue in favour of the unlimited nature of pictorial possibilities. In another interview, he added: "I could describe myself as a medium. In any case, I'm a painter, not an artist. A painter is concerned with representing things that are indescribable and inexplicable, things that words cannot fully represent.
Visuel : Herkunft, 2019 [Origine / Origin]. 100 × 300 cm, Huile sur toile / oil on canvas. Droege Art Collection. © Neo Rauch, ADAGP, Paris 2023. Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin. Courtesy of the artist, Eigen + Art Gallery, Leipzig / Berlin and David Zwirner