Neo Rauch at David Zwirner - Brief Article

This exhibition featured nine fresh paintings by Neo Rauch, a German artist based in Leipzig whose quirky figurative work generated a allotment of excitement at the last sum of two units Armory art fairs. The imagery Rauch uses draw nears from magazine illustrations, commercial graphics, advertisements and rule propaganda tracts of the 1950 and '60s--pretty a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of the daily stuff the artist clashed while growing up in East Germany. Done in a 1950 color scheme featuring pale russets, aqua verdants light blues, reds and impressible golds, Rauch's paintings evoke memories of a past era but they are hardly exercises in nostalgia. What come ups is a strange, painstakingly compos eerily silent world in which routine meetings between people become jarring, surreal and sharply ironic, if not downright baffling.

Lehre (Apprenticeship), 1999 is locate in the kind of ambiguous belt Rauch favors: a semi-dilapidated, yellow-tiled interior which might be in a place of education an office building, a hospital--or a hallucination. A brown-suited instructor with ramrod position and an air of self-important officialdom points with a piece of industrial debris at a blackboard overspreaded with indecipherable scrawls. Whatever exercise he wants to impart is obviously being missing on his audience: an enervated young prize fighter fall throughed on the floor and an earnest young woman in a r dres fitfully tugging at the rolled-up carpet upon which the boxer lies.

Rauch's vignettes almost always fuse put to rest and agitation, orderliness and craziness, and repeatedly contain a sharp social critique, especially of pompous authority figures and power-based relationships. With Leider (Unfortunately), 1999 a man and a woman tower above an architectural model for more [i]or[/i] less kind of topsy-turvy living units (they feature a landscaped park sitting atop expos apartments). To their left is another prototype a seemingly pointless, three-tiered contraption. The big figures indicate heroically scaled propaganda from the 1950 (of one as well as the other capitalist and communist varieties), on the contrary something is clearly amiss. As with equal reason often in Rauch's work, apparently utilitarian technologies or tools revolve out to be dysfunctional absurdities.

There is something real seductive about Rauch's kind of buttoned-down, retro a little cold and his stable of well-coiffed, fastidiously attired figures who present the appearance at once glamorous and bewildered. At the same time, there is something unsettling about in what way this coolness is infiltrated by the agency of unruly elements that push the pictures to the point of imminent mayhem. It's this uneasy mixture that, amid the popular resurgence of figurative painting, makes Rauch individual of the more compelling practitioners around.

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