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Lot Essay
“Devoid of figures, [Acker] shows a vast tilled, sharply receding field and evokes Anselm Kiefer, Caspar David Friedrich and Courbet. As the eye moves towards a distant greensward, it is stopped midway by a line of four leafless, undernourished trees, which seem stranded in a trench. It is a lush, haunting picture, a view of no-man’s land that points towards a happy ending”–Robert Smith, The New York Times, April 2002.
(R. Smith, “Art in Review: Neo Rauch,” The New York Times, April 26, 2002).
Considered amongst the most prominent painters working today, Neo Rauch creates poetic visions that conflate time, space, dreams and reality in a style that is quintessentially his own. A true testament to the artist’s Pop-Surrealist-Social Realist approach, Neo Rauch’s Acker layers reality and sur-reality amidst a sprawling, feverish landscape that radiates with a sense of apocalyptic enigma. Through his distinctive combination of figurative imagery and surrealist abstraction, Rauch challenges the legacy of German Romantic landscape painting and creates a captivating dreamscape rendition that astutely reflects the contemporary states of our time.
Painted on a monumental scale, Neo Rauch’s Acker plunges the viewer into a fiery red and deserted landscape. The saturated tone of the scene contrasts with its emptiness suggesting a post-apocalyptic setting that alludes to Rauch’s constant fascination with the human condition, and the idea of a society poised on the brink between creation and collapse. The work is split into three distinct planes that fluctuate between figuration, and a Rothko-esque abstraction. A tumbling row of red rocks lines the lower portion of the canvas before giving way to a vast pastoral field, in the same shade of red. The burning red recedes towards a green, faraway land filled with trees and one lone house – the only sign of human presence in the otherwise abandoned scene. Rauch juxtaposes his violent and vehement red, with a hazy sky of baby blue and grey. The shifting planes, phantasmagoric use of color and surreal subject matter–all within the confines of the artist’s strikingly realistic approach–create a mirage-like vision that calls into question both the nature of representation, and the representation of nature itself.
Rauch was born in Liepzig, East Germany in 1960. Growing up under the shadow of communism, Rauch’s relationship to his country is a central focus in his work as he constantly yearns to negotiate Germany’s united present, with its tormented past. The artist’s work reflects a strong relationship to the socialist realist legacy of his contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, with a strong reference to the Surrealist masters past, such as Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico and Rene Magritte. In regard to his counterparts, Rauch’s relationship to history is less overt. Rather, Rauch creates ambiguous scenes that deny recourse to any sense of established reality, but allude to it through a series of dichotomies within his pictorial approach. Acker – and its tenuous balance between dream and real worlds – reflects this very negotiation. The captivating contrast of the fiery red fields and the overarching, soft blue sky addresses this disjunction while also pointing to the artist’s signature use of contrasting colors.
Having studied at the renowned Art Academy in Leipzig in the early 1990s, Rauch received a formal training that prioritized traditional art making practices such as drawing from the model, mastering perspective and carefully analyzing and constructing the composition–all of which inform the artist’s virtuosic technique. True to this legacy, Rauch begins his large compositions by drawing a sketch directly on the canvas, before building his images in a deft and fluid manner. It is this very mastery of the academic conventions of perspective that allows Rauch to deliberately manipulate his treatment of scale. Acker’s shifting planes, contrasting colors and enigmatic themes amidst the expansive scale of his composition epitomizes the artist’s astute practice.
In Acker, it is Rauch’s careful fusion of compositional ingenuity with subtle symbolic content that make his fiery fields so poignantly captivating. The four leafless, distorted trees that line the foreground of the composition point to Rauch’s constant fascination with the fragility of the human condition, while also pointing to its resilience, as they remain standing despite being seemingly stripped of life. This existential backbone anchors the ominous and violent recession of Rauch’s reds, while pointing once again to the artist’s ongoing negotiation of his own personal history within the context of industrial alienation. Faced with such expanse, one’s eye shifts through the different planes of Rauch’s composition as though moving through different time zones or planes of existence altogether.
(R. Smith, “Art in Review: Neo Rauch,” The New York Times, April 26, 2002).
Considered amongst the most prominent painters working today, Neo Rauch creates poetic visions that conflate time, space, dreams and reality in a style that is quintessentially his own. A true testament to the artist’s Pop-Surrealist-Social Realist approach, Neo Rauch’s Acker layers reality and sur-reality amidst a sprawling, feverish landscape that radiates with a sense of apocalyptic enigma. Through his distinctive combination of figurative imagery and surrealist abstraction, Rauch challenges the legacy of German Romantic landscape painting and creates a captivating dreamscape rendition that astutely reflects the contemporary states of our time.
Painted on a monumental scale, Neo Rauch’s Acker plunges the viewer into a fiery red and deserted landscape. The saturated tone of the scene contrasts with its emptiness suggesting a post-apocalyptic setting that alludes to Rauch’s constant fascination with the human condition, and the idea of a society poised on the brink between creation and collapse. The work is split into three distinct planes that fluctuate between figuration, and a Rothko-esque abstraction. A tumbling row of red rocks lines the lower portion of the canvas before giving way to a vast pastoral field, in the same shade of red. The burning red recedes towards a green, faraway land filled with trees and one lone house – the only sign of human presence in the otherwise abandoned scene. Rauch juxtaposes his violent and vehement red, with a hazy sky of baby blue and grey. The shifting planes, phantasmagoric use of color and surreal subject matter–all within the confines of the artist’s strikingly realistic approach–create a mirage-like vision that calls into question both the nature of representation, and the representation of nature itself.
Rauch was born in Liepzig, East Germany in 1960. Growing up under the shadow of communism, Rauch’s relationship to his country is a central focus in his work as he constantly yearns to negotiate Germany’s united present, with its tormented past. The artist’s work reflects a strong relationship to the socialist realist legacy of his contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, with a strong reference to the Surrealist masters past, such as Yves Tanguy, Giorgio de Chirico and Rene Magritte. In regard to his counterparts, Rauch’s relationship to history is less overt. Rather, Rauch creates ambiguous scenes that deny recourse to any sense of established reality, but allude to it through a series of dichotomies within his pictorial approach. Acker – and its tenuous balance between dream and real worlds – reflects this very negotiation. The captivating contrast of the fiery red fields and the overarching, soft blue sky addresses this disjunction while also pointing to the artist’s signature use of contrasting colors.
Having studied at the renowned Art Academy in Leipzig in the early 1990s, Rauch received a formal training that prioritized traditional art making practices such as drawing from the model, mastering perspective and carefully analyzing and constructing the composition–all of which inform the artist’s virtuosic technique. True to this legacy, Rauch begins his large compositions by drawing a sketch directly on the canvas, before building his images in a deft and fluid manner. It is this very mastery of the academic conventions of perspective that allows Rauch to deliberately manipulate his treatment of scale. Acker’s shifting planes, contrasting colors and enigmatic themes amidst the expansive scale of his composition epitomizes the artist’s astute practice.
In Acker, it is Rauch’s careful fusion of compositional ingenuity with subtle symbolic content that make his fiery fields so poignantly captivating. The four leafless, distorted trees that line the foreground of the composition point to Rauch’s constant fascination with the fragility of the human condition, while also pointing to its resilience, as they remain standing despite being seemingly stripped of life. This existential backbone anchors the ominous and violent recession of Rauch’s reds, while pointing once again to the artist’s ongoing negotiation of his own personal history within the context of industrial alienation. Faced with such expanse, one’s eye shifts through the different planes of Rauch’s composition as though moving through different time zones or planes of existence altogether.