Artist Birthday: Neo Rauch

Leipzig-based Neo Rauch is part of the generation of German artists who revitalized German painting starting in the late 1900s. His work is a combination of late East German Socialist Realism, opera-like narration, and painterly abstraction.

Artist birthday for 18 April: Neo Rauch (born 1960 Germany)

Neo Rauch is an important German painter from former East Germany instrumental in helping to revive German contemporary painting in the late 1900s.

Neo Rauch, Busch, 2001, oil on paper, 198.1 x 198.1 cm  The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2025 Neo Rauch / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York  (MOMA-P1052raars)

Like many of Rauch's early works, Busch displays ambiguous actions in multiple scenes within the painting, that shows the artist's inclination to elements of t absurd and unconscious. Busch, German for the word "bush", is vague in its relation to the figure group of men in the center of the composition, ones of whom waves a bush branch in the ai. There is unquestionably a bush between the rear legs of a hybrid human/centaur in a business suit. Or does the "bush" refer to the prominent red one before the male holding a burning book? Rauch leaves these clues for the viewer, without ever explaining what is happening. Rauch's amorphous figurative world also aligns at some level with Pop Art's depiction of the every day.  The major affinity to Surrealism in Rauch’s work is his employing dreams in his work, combining remnants of Social Realism with popular imagery from Western capitalism.

For most of the 1900s, painting remained, in the West, the primary vehicle for the development of modernism. From the early developments of Expressionism and  Cubism to the triumphant advent of Abstract Expressionism, painting was hailed as most critics' vision of the perfect medium for the expression of modernist ideas. Even movements that questioned the conventions of painting -- such as the Dadaists and Surrealists -- acknowledged, even in their own work, the primacy of painting.

Starting in the 1950s, several movements challenged that primacy, in the movements of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Postmodernism. Yet, many artists in the last decades of the 1900s persisted in their insistence on painting as one of the most valid modes of personal expression. One of the movements that resurrected the importance of painting was generally called Neo-Expressionism. Working with the slashing brushwork and intense color of German Expressionism, these artists emerged in the 1970s, some of them pursuing abstraction, and others varying degrees of realism. The phenomenon extended beyond painting to include sculpture, photography and digital art.

Neo Rauch was born in Leipzig, then part of Communist East Germany. His formative years occurred  during the construction of the Berlin Wall, leading him to forever stay clear of making art for propaganda or political purposes. His passion for art began as a young child when he had a natural interest in drawing, literature and culture. An early epiphany, at age 12, was the discovery of a book of images about the work of Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989). Rauch studied at the College for Graphic and Book Arts (1981-1986), and then further for a Masters from the same school (1986-1990). After the reunification of Germany in 1990, Rauch’s work was lumped together with other eastern German artists whose work featured figuration into the term the New Leipzig School.

Even in his earliest work, however, Rauch’s figurative painting was distinct from the dominant Socialist Realism of eastern Germany, and the Neo-Expressionism in the West. Despite comparisons to Surrealism, Rauch rejects the idea of “automatism” (intuitive creation), indicating that his canvas is like his mind, in which anything is possible. He starts paintings with no preconceived ideas for composition. Typically, his works present contradictory realities that, although unintelligible, are seemingly unified through color. Rauch’s work did not receive major attention until his first one person show in Leipzig in 1993, and he exploded into international recognition after his work appeared in the 1999 Armory Show in New York.