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Descriptif du lot
Painted in twilight purples, pinks and greens, Neo Rauch’s Zähmung (Taming) (2011) spans five metres over two joined canvases, giving it the grandeur of a stage set. The scene is mesmerising and uncanny. A man and a woman attend to a giraffe-like animal with aubergine fur. Behind them are a clawed vehicle in nuclear green, a pink humanoid form and buildings being raised or demolished. Smaller figures to the left hold flaming torches. A man in the foreground wears an illegible sign: another emerges from a glowing manhole, pulling out a cable strung with ambiguous shapes. A sci-fi pincer reaches out to him from a brightly-lit room to the right, where a man sits in mysterious labour among further objects and figures. A centrepiece of Rauch’s 2013 survey show at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels—where it was the first painting visitors saw—Zähmung is emblematic of the artist’s dreamlike approach, which gives form to the shadowy, free-associative motions of his subconscious.
Rauch was born in 1960 in Leipzig, in communist East Germany, to young parents who were killed in a train crash when he was just five weeks old. He went on to attend the Leipzig Art Academy, where they had been students. A submerged sense of rupture resounds through his paintings, which read like allegories but defy interpretation or closure. Their ‘personnel’ and scenery arise, he says, of their own accord, and are arranged according to pictorial rather than symbolic logic. Formal rhymes can be followed across Zähmung: the angled arm of the vehicle echoes the green lamp in the office, while its pincers are restated in the robotic limbs. On the windowsill, reprising these elements in miniature, are a clawed pot-plant and another alien vehicle. ‘My basic artistic approach is that I let things permeate through me, without any hierarchical pre-selection’, says Rauch. ‘And from the material I filter out, I then construct a private, very personal mosaic’ (N. Rauch quoted in H. Liebs, ‘Nothing Embarrasses me Now,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 September 2006, p. 18).
While the aesthetics of Socialist Realist propaganda can be felt in Rauch’s work, he maintains that artists such Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Salvador Dalí and Otto Dix were more central to his training in Leipzig. The frescoes of Giotto in Assisi, Italy, which he saw on his first trip abroad after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, were an even greater influence. Giotto’s dynamic harmonies of human action and chromatic power encouraged him to pursue the narrative quality that was developing in his own work. During the 1990s, as the former East Germany became more outward-facing, Rauch began to gather international acclaim. His works were sometimes understood as products of a hermetic lost world, or revelations of the psychic impact of the region’s recent history. With their mutating forms, disjunctive costumes, and obscurely ceremonial activity—often taking place in public spaces—they might more broadly be viewed as pictures of our communal constitution of history itself, which is an ever-changing theatre of dreams, cultural upheavals and competing stories.
Zähmung displays the mounting ambition and scale of Rauch’s work during the 2010s. Five years later he would design sets and costumes for a production of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bayreuth opera festival. Here he assembles his pageant of characters in dress from different eras, variously recalling nineteenth-century burghers, Soviet military men, bureaucrats or members of a travelling circus. There are signs of decay—a falling bird, graffiti and debris in the foreground—and of reconstruction. The title’s ‘taming’ speaks to the way Rauch mines and translates material from his subconscious. The excavation and processing of objects from beneath the earth, as seen here, is a common visual theme. As the exotic giraffe suggests, however, there is something stubbornly wild about Rauch’s workings that refuses resolution. It is this open-endedness that gives the painting its magic. Every figure and piece of scenery appears contingent, liable at any moment to melt away, reorganise or spring into strange, surprising new life.
Rauch was born in 1960 in Leipzig, in communist East Germany, to young parents who were killed in a train crash when he was just five weeks old. He went on to attend the Leipzig Art Academy, where they had been students. A submerged sense of rupture resounds through his paintings, which read like allegories but defy interpretation or closure. Their ‘personnel’ and scenery arise, he says, of their own accord, and are arranged according to pictorial rather than symbolic logic. Formal rhymes can be followed across Zähmung: the angled arm of the vehicle echoes the green lamp in the office, while its pincers are restated in the robotic limbs. On the windowsill, reprising these elements in miniature, are a clawed pot-plant and another alien vehicle. ‘My basic artistic approach is that I let things permeate through me, without any hierarchical pre-selection’, says Rauch. ‘And from the material I filter out, I then construct a private, very personal mosaic’ (N. Rauch quoted in H. Liebs, ‘Nothing Embarrasses me Now,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13 September 2006, p. 18).
While the aesthetics of Socialist Realist propaganda can be felt in Rauch’s work, he maintains that artists such Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, Salvador Dalí and Otto Dix were more central to his training in Leipzig. The frescoes of Giotto in Assisi, Italy, which he saw on his first trip abroad after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, were an even greater influence. Giotto’s dynamic harmonies of human action and chromatic power encouraged him to pursue the narrative quality that was developing in his own work. During the 1990s, as the former East Germany became more outward-facing, Rauch began to gather international acclaim. His works were sometimes understood as products of a hermetic lost world, or revelations of the psychic impact of the region’s recent history. With their mutating forms, disjunctive costumes, and obscurely ceremonial activity—often taking place in public spaces—they might more broadly be viewed as pictures of our communal constitution of history itself, which is an ever-changing theatre of dreams, cultural upheavals and competing stories.
Zähmung displays the mounting ambition and scale of Rauch’s work during the 2010s. Five years later he would design sets and costumes for a production of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Bayreuth opera festival. Here he assembles his pageant of characters in dress from different eras, variously recalling nineteenth-century burghers, Soviet military men, bureaucrats or members of a travelling circus. There are signs of decay—a falling bird, graffiti and debris in the foreground—and of reconstruction. The title’s ‘taming’ speaks to the way Rauch mines and translates material from his subconscious. The excavation and processing of objects from beneath the earth, as seen here, is a common visual theme. As the exotic giraffe suggests, however, there is something stubbornly wild about Rauch’s workings that refuses resolution. It is this open-endedness that gives the painting its magic. Every figure and piece of scenery appears contingent, liable at any moment to melt away, reorganise or spring into strange, surprising new life.