Pilzernte

Figurative painting, now firmly back at the heart of contemporary artistic practice, is often understood to be the most accurate reflection of the zeitgeist of an age, like a document of social history. Neo Rauch, hailing from Leipzig, has often been portrayed as the painter of the 'failed utopia' of the eastern bloc, and certainly a passing reading of his paintings encourages this take on his work. The East German tradition of illustration and graphic design from the 1930s-1950s and the more insidiious presence of 'official art,' namely the kind of heroic Social Realist painting that is now in vogue, of course inform Rauch's visual language. Full of strangely static physical acts of labour, the timeless figures who appear in his interior and exteriors come from a familiar lexicon of Surrealist and Socialist imagery.

However, Rauch's visual plundering of past graphics is only a part of the whole for the artist. His work is as much about the here and now, his geographical and polictical position and the validity of painting as a medium in the twenty first century.

The key protagonist in much of Rauch's art, is the figure of the 'artist' or 'painter', struggling (sometimes violently) with some public rivalry or private demon. In Pilzernte, the two protagonists appear to be an artist lost in hopeless contemplation confronted by his burly more practical workmate. Both characters carry what appear to be comically useless tools for the task in hand - literally the cutting down of trees - metaphorically the purging of the past, the weird felled tree trunks with their alien branches signalling a forgotten Romantic vision of the German landscape, in life and in art.

Rauch's skillful inversion of the retro theme plays with our sense of time and place through such anachronistic details and his manipulation of this hackneyed visual language into layers of meaning that are designed to confuse and seduce the viewer simultaneously.