Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch's first solo exhibition in Spain brings together twenty or so paintings, mostly in large format, which summarise his work over the last few years (2002-2005). Rauch's contribution to contemporary art is regarded as one of the most valuable today. His engmatic works, whose roots are sunk in the pictorial language of postwar Eastern Europe, bear witness to the new thrust painting has been enjoying in recent years.

Educated at the legendary Leipzig Academy, in the school of socialist realism, Neo Rauch has become one of its most influential graduates. His painting blends elements of industrial symbolism, pictorial figuration, German romanticism, the communist aesthetic, surrealism, the comic and Leipzig mannerism.

The juxtaposition of all those elements combined with his particular use of colour produces a fundamentally eloquent work, in which the action or actions recounted seem to be suspended in time, all beneath a halo of hallucation which heightens the mystery which emanates from his paintings.

Impassive athletic figures engaged in manual tasks often appear,facing arid settings, industrial complexes, futuristic yet strangely old-fashioned devices which endow Rauch's narrative discourse with a sometimes disquieting ambiguity.

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Neo Rauch