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Lot Essay
Executed shortly after his first solo exhibition, this immense work by Neo Rauch is a spellbinding example of the artist’s virtuosic technical prowess, whilst demonstrating the programmatic interests of a young artist working in post-unification Germany. In a range of media, and with an earthy, dulcet palette, Rauch creates an astonishingly detailed, surrealistic landscape, hovering between territorial figuration and fantastical abstraction. The composition is punctuated by a series of black, striped or funnel-like motifs, which stream towards the picture plane or plummet into the ground like whirlwinds in a challenging perspectival illusion. Though strictly adhering to an academic sense of orthogonal perspective, Rauch confuses pictorial space by integrating a complex cross-section of semi-abstract industrial forms.
With its mechanical kintecism and metallic gleam, this imagery nostalgically alludes to the hopeful aspirations of pre-war industrialisation, emphasised by the large, megaphonic cone at the top-right of the composition, subtly embossed with a renewed promise of licht (light). This proclamation is juxtaposed by a subterranean inscription in the lower half of the work – malebolge – which refers to Dante’s eighth circle of Hell (the literal translation is ‘evil ditches’). Maturing at the same time as German unification, Neo Rauch’s work reminiscently emphasises the natural destruction and social hardship of this promised utopia; as Wolfgang Büscher has noted, ‘his paintings are like aftershocks from the volcanic period that lies behind us, and they presage the quakes to come’ (W. Büscher, ‘Open Pit’, in Neo Rauch, Taschen, Köln, 2012, p. 8). The depopulated landscape of Neo Rauch’s Untitled also speaks to the social alienation administered by this industrial development, and perhaps carries a personal significance, as Rauch tragically lost both parents in a train accident when he was only four weeks old.
Regardless of its possible thematic weight, Untitled is a dreamlike landscape of visionary composition, cartoonish forms and light colours. The work is constructed in an abundance of media (oil, collage, and gouache on paper), which gives the piece an air of nimble brightness, like an architectural drawing or a newspaper illustration. Combining graphic accuracy with an airy palette inspired by East Germany (where walls were mostly whitewashed and facades of buildings painted bright yellows), the landscape is lifted to an otherworldly realm of imagination and impossibility. Whilst he refutes comparison to Surrealism, Rauch’s uncanny treatment of the landscape recalls the sparser works of Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí, with an appropriate pictorial surreality that retrospectively envisions an unattainable modernity. Untitled evokes a hallucinatory illusion of the past, whilst anticipating an iconic and individualised original style from one of Germany’s most celebrated recent artists.
With its mechanical kintecism and metallic gleam, this imagery nostalgically alludes to the hopeful aspirations of pre-war industrialisation, emphasised by the large, megaphonic cone at the top-right of the composition, subtly embossed with a renewed promise of licht (light). This proclamation is juxtaposed by a subterranean inscription in the lower half of the work – malebolge – which refers to Dante’s eighth circle of Hell (the literal translation is ‘evil ditches’). Maturing at the same time as German unification, Neo Rauch’s work reminiscently emphasises the natural destruction and social hardship of this promised utopia; as Wolfgang Büscher has noted, ‘his paintings are like aftershocks from the volcanic period that lies behind us, and they presage the quakes to come’ (W. Büscher, ‘Open Pit’, in Neo Rauch, Taschen, Köln, 2012, p. 8). The depopulated landscape of Neo Rauch’s Untitled also speaks to the social alienation administered by this industrial development, and perhaps carries a personal significance, as Rauch tragically lost both parents in a train accident when he was only four weeks old.
Regardless of its possible thematic weight, Untitled is a dreamlike landscape of visionary composition, cartoonish forms and light colours. The work is constructed in an abundance of media (oil, collage, and gouache on paper), which gives the piece an air of nimble brightness, like an architectural drawing or a newspaper illustration. Combining graphic accuracy with an airy palette inspired by East Germany (where walls were mostly whitewashed and facades of buildings painted bright yellows), the landscape is lifted to an otherworldly realm of imagination and impossibility. Whilst he refutes comparison to Surrealism, Rauch’s uncanny treatment of the landscape recalls the sparser works of Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí, with an appropriate pictorial surreality that retrospectively envisions an unattainable modernity. Untitled evokes a hallucinatory illusion of the past, whilst anticipating an iconic and individualised original style from one of Germany’s most celebrated recent artists.