Wolfgang Büscher

In a lakeside scene, a man leans on a graphic of an arrow as if it were a rake handle in the garden; tentacles rise from the shoreline and rectangular speech bubbles hang empty in the yellow sky. In a Dali-esque interior, the corner of a comforter drips off a bed. This major new overview of the work of the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch makes, once again, the case that he is one of the most important artists of his generation. He remains committed to putting brush on canvas in an age when digital show more media are gaining ground, and among a crowd of similarly dedicated colleagues, he stands out at the forefront. While his work of the 1980s was influenced by Expressionism, his more recent portfolio revels in a new take on Socialist Realism, clearly shaped by the experience of growing up in the former East Germany. Rauch riffs on the once-mandated styles of his youth and on western abstraction from the second half of the twentieth century, all in coloration and figuration that directly allude to the Socialist past. Between cartoon styling and historic technique, he has found a distinctive style, palette and concept. These dreamlike sequences feel both timeless and deeply rooted: Rauch gathers figures from the past in surreal landscapes and interiors to tell enigmatic stories about the present. show less

High colour and definition prints of Neo Rauch's paintings from the 1980s to 2009. A beautiful object of a book - large-scale and carefully designed.

Five essays are included: The first by Wolfgang Buscher is a sentimental biography of Rauch that is wonderfully written and perfectly sentimental. The next three critical analyses by Harald Kunde explore the works and their motifs in detail, and finally Gary Tinterow tells a brief story about Rauch's latest exhibition prior to the book's show more publication. show less

Great book. The author captures a certain conservative Midwestern mindset so perfectly that I regret only having read it in German.

versucht zu lesen, doch Stil gefällt nicht