Curated by Holger Broeker
Forty-six-year-old German painter Neo Rauch occupies a unique space on the contemporary-art horizon. In a post-medium, post-ism art world, Rauch has been heralded in certain circles for spawning an entirely new branch of painting. While the burgeoning success of the New Leipzig School (named after the painter’s hometown and his epigones’ base of operations) has helped underscore some of the more salient characteristics of the artist’s production—namely, its surrealistic collision of disjoined imagery executed in a faux social realism—it has arguably, if ironically, reduced the discussion of his art to questions of style. Gathering nearly eighty paintings from 1993 to today, this midcareer retrospective should provide an important opportunity to disengage Rauch from the interpretative grip of his followers and to take a wider view of his own still-developing art.
