Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch – Art studies with Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig

Neo Rauch was born on 18 April 1960 in Leipzig. Barely four weeks after his birth, he lost his father and mother in the great railway accident in Leipzig and so grew up with his maternal grandparents who, in the artist’s own words, were overprotective ‘helicopter parents’. After graduating from the Stephaneum grammar school, he attended the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts to study painting and formed a lifelong friendship with his first teacher there, Arno Rink. Following Rink’s death, Rauch defended him against emerging criticism and explained somewhat provocatively that his friend and teacher had been undervalued for years because the West had not wanted to show any interest in a celebrated artist of the GDR after the reunification. Neo Rauch took part in the group exhibition ‘Junge Künstker im Bezirk Leipzig’ in 1986 and attracted attention for the first time. That same year he moved as master student to Bernhard Heisig, graduating under him in 1990.

Rapid international ascent in the 1990s

Neo Rauch soon distanced himself emphatically from his early work of the 1980s – he even stated on record on his 60th birthday that he lacked the necessary ‘mellowness of age and composure’ to deal with his first paintings. Following the painter’s first solo exhibition in the Leipzig Galerie am Thomaskirchhof in 1993, he was noticed by Rolf Lauter, Deputy Director at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt at that time, who brought the artist to the attention of the West. With her much-read article about ‘the painter who came out of the cold’, the American art critic Roberta Smith gave Neo Rauch an immense popularity push in the USA which ultimately led to the painter’s works now being found not only in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, but also being acquired by enthusiastic celebrities such as Brad Pitt for their private collections.

Anachronisms between dream and reality

Neo Rausch is not easy to categorize. His pictures, which always undergo a transformation from the first idea, through their execution, to the completed work, draw their mostly large format stature from the means of Pop Art, Surrealism and cartoon graphics. Yet the colours always remain conspicuously in the background, are never garish and colourful, but nestle with greater restraint against the figures and landscapes. This suits the always perceptible distance to reality that is inherent in Neo Rauch’s pictures. Although his motifs are clearly rooted in the artist’s home of Leipzig and the surrounding area, which are important to the artist, these references to reality often flow into a slightly surreal-like intermediate world, a blurred zone, similar to a dream, through which the painter leads his audience. The pictures are always experiments, also, in which the artist explores the boundaries of his imagination, embedding signs of the times, but never taking the final step to abstraction. 

Reticent superstar of the art scene

Neo Rauch had to bear much malice early on for his commitment to figurative painting. Despite this, he stuck steadfastly to his path, which was to prove extremely successful – in contrast to the initial resistance of the art critics. Having grown up in an environment of party cliques and mistrust in the GDR, Neo Rauch largely avoids publicity in the Federal Republic and rarely speaks out. When he does, he does so in a somewhat outdated language – or with a painter’s weapons, such as his acknowledgment of an art critic’s attempt to accuse him of rightwing sentiments with the sensational painting Der Anbräuner, the title of which he borrowed from the conservative writer Ernst Jünger. Neo Rauch has received prizes and awards for his work, including the Art Prize of the Leipziger Volkszeitung in 1997, the Finkenwerder Art Prize in 2005, the First Class Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2018, and the European Culture Prize Taurus in 2019.

Neo Rauch is married to the painter Rosa Loy (Sibille Rauch) and lives in his hometown of Leipzig.