Neo Rauch valuation
Leipzig painter of dream-logic scenes where socialist realism and surrealism share a canvas.
Neo Rauch was born in Leipzig in 1960 and lost both parents in a rail accident when he was four weeks old.
What a work by Neo Rauch is worth
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Bio
Neo Rauch was born in Leipzig in 1960 and lost both parents in a rail accident when he was four weeks old. He trained at the Leipzig academy under Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig, absorbing the technical grounding of East German socialist realism, and became the central figure of the New Leipzig School after reunification. The paintings are large and highly finished, populated by figures in period costume performing tasks whose purpose is never explained, in landscapes that shift scale and logic mid-picture — the visual grammar of propaganda used to produce something closer to a dream.
The paintings are unique, are frequently very large, and are painted in oil on canvas with a conventional and stable technique, so the condition questions are ordinary ones. Dating and scale are the identifying facts, along with the title, which is usually a single German word. Works on paper — drawings, watercolours and gouaches — are more numerous and are collected in their own right. There is an editioned print output through named publishers. Gallery provenance, principally Eigen und Art in Leipzig and Berlin, is the usual reference.
The Baumwollspinnerei and the Met
Rauch's parents were both students at the Leipzig academy when they died, and he was brought up by his grandparents. His first solo exhibition was at the Galerie am Thomaskirchhof in Leipzig in 1991, and in 1993 Rolf Lauter of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt arranged his first museum presentation. He works with his wife, the painter Rosa Loy, in the former cotton mill of the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei.
Roberta Smith of the New York Times drew American attention to him in 2002, and in 2007 he painted a series for a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has also shown at the Albertina in Vienna in 2004 and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2006, and was professor at the Leipzig academy from 2005 to 2009.
Aschersleben, Rink and Heisig, and Eigen + Art
Rauch grew up with his grandparents in Aschersleben and took his Abitur at the Thomas-Müntzer-Oberschule there. At the Leipzig academy he was a master student of Arno Rink from 1981 to 1986 and of Bernhard Heisig from 1986 to 1990, and after the fall of the GDR he worked as assistant to Rink and Sighard Gille from 1993 to 1998. Critics trace debts to de Chirico and Magritte; as Charlotte Mullins has put it, architecture peters out, uniformed men from one century intimidate people from another, and struggles break out for reasons that never become clear.
In 2004 he selected EASTinternational with Gerd Harry Lybke, the founder of Eigen + Art, and with the photographer Timm Rautert he curated an exhibition at Gut Selikum in Neuss. He lives at Markkleeberg, just outside Leipzig, and is represented by Eigen + Art in Leipzig and Berlin and by David Zwirner in New York. Nicola Graef's film Neo Rauch: Comrades and Companions came out in 2016.
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