Galerie Eigen + Art, Berlin/Leipzig
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2006

Leipzig, Galerie Eigen + Art, Neo Rauch. Der Zeitraum, 2006, pl. 11, illustrated in colour
Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste; Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne, Neo Rauch - Begleiter, p. 46-47, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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“Angels clothed in ordinary coats waft in as if they wanted to thwart a contemporary Sacrifice of Isaac. Figures in trance between here and now. Beings in this world, but not of it…”

Rudij Bergman, Familiarity Blown Away, Exhibition Catalogue, Leipzig, Galerie Eigen + Art, Neo Rauch Der Zeitraum, 2010, n.p.


Executed in 2006 Theorie magnificently exemplifies the core facets that have earned Neo Rauch his status as one of the most original artists of his generation. Embodying a fascinating amalgam of surrealist dream and art historical quotation passed through the cultural lens of a reunified East Germany, Rauch’s work is both enigmatic yet indefatigably in tune with the here and now. Subtly atmospheric with an extraordinarily inventive compositional and chromatic schema, Theorie stands as vivid testament to the powerful yet paradoxical impact of Neo Rauch’s art.

Robust angels wearing outmoded fashions and bearing metal rods like scepters or swords occupy the very front of the composition. Positioned upstage, Rauch’s winged characters appear as a cast of militant valkyries - Wagnerian Brunnhildes set to work on an unidentified construction site. At once Rauch conjures Dürer’s famous German archetype of melancholia as a downcast female angel, whilst also evoking the combative Archangel Michael. Characteristically portrayed wielding his sword or scepter, this warrior saint appears in both Judaic and Christian scriptures as the leader of God’s army against the forces of Satan during the war in heaven. Indeed, wielding and interlocking their staffs, Rauch’s distinctly earthly celestial beings echo historical depictions of Archangel Michael overcoming the devil by Renaissance masters Guido Reni and Raphael. Directly militant, protective and active within Rauch’s composition, they stand resolute yet removed and inexplicably between the masculine figures contained within a building receding into the distance. Seemingly oblivious to their presence, these characters, perhaps also workmen – a key trope within Rauch’s oeuvre – are comparatively inactive. Presiding over what appears to be a Bavarian town in miniature, these angel-like beings signal physical activity dislocated from the masculine interior, the inhabitants of which appear to be brandishing sheets of paper. Here, Rauch’s work draws upon the aesthetic and thematics of propaganda imagery proliferate across the Allied, Soviet and German sides during World War II. One of the many strands of these campaigns focused on stereotypes of robust women heroically encouraging the female populus to assume the working roles left behind by their husbands.

Rauch’s integration of such graphic modalities from the world of propaganda and advertising, as well as influence from comic strips such as Herge’s Tintin and the nostalgia imbued vintage promotional holiday illustrations from the pre-war era, form a central pivot in his encompassing aesthetic. Though reminiscent of these graphic modalities, in Rauch’s visual dialect chalky block colours and stylized, vacuous doll-like human figures are reworked with a marked coarseness and overriding sense of disillusionment. Articulated using thick, matt oil paint on rough canvas, the painter’s theatrics are staged within a landscape populated by the trappings of an industrial workshop. Without the idealism desperately present within his pantheon of visual citation, Rauch retrospectively speaks from a fractured socio-political moment in the history Eastern Germany.

Born in Leipzig in 1960, growing up, Rauch was subject to a nation under the severe soviet auspices of the GDR – a disquiet that resonates in his work as an overwhelming atmosphere of futility and misplaced hope, and one far from quelled by the unification of Germany following 1989. It is an overarching restlessness and uncomfortable anxiety attuned to the ineptitude and pathos of both communism and capitalism that exudes from these works: Neo Rauch speaks in the pictorial language of a vanished time, the world of the Workers and Farmer’s State. Lynne Cooke has labeled his corpus "Cryptic and enigmatic in relation to cause, purpose and ambition, it cleaves a precarious path between the twin dangers of nostalgia for a lost idyll, an edenic world of social unity and communality, and a blanket condemnation of present conditions as riddled by anomie and despair, moral, social and psychological" (Lynne Cooke in Exhibition Catalogue, Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, Neo Rauch, 2002, p. 6). Indeed, Rauch possesses the exceptional faculty of being able to allegorize, abstract and recapitulate the biography of his nation. Theorie captures an atmosphere of latent aggression, bewilderment and the hesitant psychology of a post-communist reunification period.

Imbued with the faded vestiges of work-ethic idealism inextricable from Socialist Realism, uniformed figures demonstratively at work or engaged in physical activity in kitchens, building sites or within military environs are portrayed as though viewed from the back-stage of an unsettling dream. Where we are dislocated from time and perspectival logic these surrealist tableaus resist our comprehension. Rauch’s uncanny reformulation of familiar Eastern bloc pictorial signs defies any overt political meaning - an equivocation further compounded by the inscrutable titling of the present work, Theorie, a moniker that acts as yet another layer of semiotic perplexity. Tracing a route from Pop culture back to Surrealism, German Expressionism and into the Renaissance, Rauch employs an extraordinary wealth of divergent signifiers that leaves the viewer bewildered and utterly enthralled by a remote, unfathomable and distinctly postmodern strangeness.