Neo Rauch. Para

Elke Hannemann, Gary Tinterow

The distinctive and atmospheric paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch (born 1960) defy easy interpretation, falling somewhere between Surrealism and popular imagery. At once familiar yet alienating, seemingly full of activity yet emotionally static, Rauch’s large-format pictures combine real, narrative and dreamlike elements, and transport the viewer into bizarre landscapes populated with semi-recognizable figures and strange beings. This vital collection of recent paintings offers an incomparable insight into the influential artist and his exploration of a parallel world where the normal is mixed freely with the absurd and the paradoxical to create works of art that are fantasy represented as fact.

About the Author: Werner Spies is former director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the author of several books on twentieth-century art, including works on Picasso and Max Ernst. Gary Tinterow is a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, specializing in nineteenth-century, modern and contemporary art.