ART CITIES: Hong Kong-Neo Rauch
Widely celebrated as one of the most influential figurative painters working today, Neo Rauch has gained international acclaim for richly colored and elaborate paintings that contain a repertoire of invented characters, settings, objects, and motifs. At once realistic and familiar, enigmatic and inscrutable, his paintings often hint at broader narratives and histories yet they are dreamlike and frequently contain disparate and overlapping spaces and forms.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Neo Rauch was raised in East Germany. Upon encountering a united Germany in the early 1990s, Rauch assimilated and parodied the social realist ruins along with the popular imagery of capitalism. His unusual style, which renders contradictory and often competing sensibilities intelligible and seemingly unified, has given rise to a generation of painters in the Leipzig area as well as a dynamic gallery scene. Rauch’s paintings share certain affinities with surrealism, namely the invocation of dreams as an escape from a rule-driven consciousness. Rauch himself, however, distances his work from easy readings. “I have no use for the cultishness of classic surrealism or for its tight repertoire of methods,” Rauch says, “In fact just the opposite is true: on my canvas, as in my mind, anything is possible.” The name of Neo Rauch’s solo exhibition “Field Signs” is taken from the work “Feldzeichen” (2023), translated as “field signs,” a large painting that features the titular objects (in particular, examples from ancient Rome) which traditionally serve as emblems for organizing military units and demarcating plots and territories by farmers or soldiers. However, in Rauch’s composition the narrative is more ambiguous: human figures of varying scale and dress engage in perplexing configurations in an interior scene. A woman and a man clad in yellow seemingly argue on the right-hand side of the canvas as a tiny fire burns in the rural landscape behind them. The same iron sign reappears in “Sonne” (2023), being wielded by a bearded figure who stands under rays of sunlight and among a series of pylons, and again in “Trift” (2023) in which the placards are utilized as different kinds of instruments. These retro-futurist objects become motifs in the artist’s paintings, an example of how forms, figures, and even certain stylistic flourishes exist as personal iconography that Rauch frequently draws upon and reincorporates into his work. In “Reue” (2023), which is translated as “regret” or “remorse,” a man and a woman in the foreground wearing traditional German dress witness the burning of a house of cards in the clearing of a forest, against a flaming red-orange sky. Rauch includes colorful butterflies and moths in “Spießer” and in “Die Nachtfalterin” (both 2023), symbols that he has returned to repeatedly since the 2010s. In “Spießer” their delicate bodies are stacked neatly on top of each other on poles, while in “Die Nachtfalterin” a large, winged insect is scrutinized by a group of characters that resemble figures painted by French realist artist Gustave Courbet. Enigmatic and ambiguous, Neo Rauch’s paintings require long, slow viewing to appreciate their complexity of composition, games of scale, and abundance of symbols. They forge unexpected links between periods and places, history and the present, and depend on references to the Italian Renaissance, German Romanticism, and Socialist Realism. Practicing a “dreamlike” mode of painting in which he freely assembles scenes and allusions, Neo Rauch offers the viewer multiple, idiosyncratic reflections on history, heritage, the power of art, the role of the artist, and the impasses of our contemporary society.
Photo: Neo Rauch, Feldzeichen, 2023 (detail). © Neo Rauch/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist, Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, and David Zwirner
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5–6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central Hong Kong, Duration: 16/11/2023-14/2/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com/
