Art critic Rudij Bergmann has stated, "For Neo Rauch, painting is reflection on what is no longer present. His is a decidedly romantic attitude of refusal that gives deeper meaning to figures frozen strangely in motion--as an allegory of universal alienation from the world and rejection of technology and as a melancholy homage to the unfulfilled promise of freedom and human happiness. There is a constant stream of memory in these works, not only of world history but also of childhood, Pop Art, and comics." Rauch possesses an artistic style and sensibility that place his paintings among the most original of our time. Rauch's palettes and compositions are reminiscent of postwar illustrations; so are his figures. They belong in the past, constantly at work in a world filled with industrial symbolism. These symbols, themselves easily identified, are difficult to interpret in the context of the works, in part due to Rauch's painterly style, ominous colors and skewed perspectives. The dichotomies at play in his work provide an overall sense of false comfort tinged with disturbance, of a situation brewing, threatening to reveal itself. This book presents his recent large works on paper completed in 2003 and 2004.

Neo Rauch: Works Paper 2003-2004 (English and German Edition)

Arts & Photography

Schröder, Klaus Albrecht

Kunde, Harald

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Building facades, parking decks, stadium roofs, sauna chairs--the banality of Matthias Hoch's urban subject matter is belied by the intense artistry of his image-making. In Hoch's photographs, "a purism of color and form pursues things to abstraction, penetrating to the essence, the idea," writes critic Michael Stoeber, and the "essence" of these familiar surfaces of our everyday environment turns out far more sensual than one might expect. Lucidly composed, Hoch's photos position the objects and topographies of city existence with a keen, almost obsessive attention to surface quality and compositional format. The artist's unexpected choices of scale and perspective evoke puzzlement and ambiguity, making for a more but often less recognizable material source. But the city itself is never quite the subject: Be they in Paris or Brussels, Hoch's metropolises would be unknowable, if not for the fact that city name and caption are one and the same. Since his early experiments in the rapidly changing urban landscapes of eastern Germany, where he was a student in Leipzig, Hoch has been exploring the ubiquitous formal language of modern European urban development. In this collection of approximately 80 individual works, the views Hoch presents demonstrate a consistently analytical approach to the space that surrounds us and a simultaneous attention to its sculptural quality.

Matthias Hoch (English and German Edition)

Maria, Sabine

In his wonderfully ambiguous One Minute Sculptures, which are only humorous at first glance, the Vienna-based conceptualist, Erwin Wurm, takes a literal approach to sculpture while also taking the medium apart: anyone can be a piece of art for a minute by following his instructions. The non-human works by which he is best known, the overinflated and floppy Fat Car and Fat House, are likewise spirited, thoughtful critiques, in this case of consumer culture. Their strained poses, like those of his One Minute participants, raise immediate, simple questions concerning normality and the meaning or lack of it in both artistic conventions and human actions. Wurm's profoundly humane work is an eye-opener to social forces, and always playful. Those who know it look forward to each new piece. This informative monograph assembles many previously unpublished videos, sculptures, installations and performances.

Erwin Wurm: The Artist Who Swallowed the World

Davila, Thierry

Fleck, Robert

Hatje Cantz

Almost singlehandedly, Leipzig school painter Neo Rauch has renewed the possibilities of allegory, politics and surrealism in contemporary painting. His epic canvases, with their disjunct components, resemble collages as much as painting, populated with characters seemingly plucked from momentous historical occasions--protestors, eminent-looking statesmen, soldiers, workers--as well as ordinary people engaged in bizarre, enigmatic actions of no apparent political/historical consequence whatsoever. The protagonists of these works, surrounded by floating symbols, abstract blobs and fragments of buildings and interiors, collide as if in some grand trans-historical continuum in which all eras come together. Realized in loud, garish hues partly informed by the artist’s early exposure to Socialist Realism, Rauch’s enigmatic pictorial narratives never vanish into explanation: “My paintings have something vital about them, like an animal, a living thing,” he says. “You don’t have to understand them, just to feel that this creation, to the greatest possible extent, is at peace with itself.” Following major solo exhibitions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2007), the Pinakothek in Munich (2010) and the Leipzig Museum of Art (2010), this new major Rauch monograph accompanies an exhibition at Bozar Expo in Brussels, and provides the most up-to-date overview of his accomplishment. The best-known exponent of the Leipzig school of painting, Neo Rauch (born 1960) was born, reared and trained as an artist in Leipzig, where he continues to live. In August 2005, Rauch was awarded the chair of painting at Leipzig University. In 2010, he received a major museum retrospective, held jointly at the Leipzig Museum of Art and the Pinakothek. In 2011, a selection of the works from this retrospective then traveled to the Zach?eta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Neo Rauch: Selected Works 1993-2012

A retrospective of Rauch's delirious painting Limited to 1,000 numbered copies, each signed by Neo Rauch.
Rife with anachronisms, peopled with seemingly random figures busy doing rather surreal things, and painted in a wide range of muted hues, Neo Rauch's paintings look like Soviet-era illustrations that have shifted into a Lynchian parallel dimension. Set in a variety of industrial locations such as power plants, factories, military buildings, 1950s apartment blocks, and construction sites, the paintings evoke societal ideals somehow gone wrong; the hard-working subjects never seem to be doing anything practical or useful and the disjointed narratives are mind-boggling in their dramatic incoherence. Looking at a Neo Rauch painting, one has the intense urge to psychoanalyze it as if it were one's own bewildering dream. Born and raised behind the Iron Curtain in Leipzig, Germany, Neo Rauch became fascinated with the late-1970s "Neue Wilde" anti-establishment movement in painting and used it as a departure point for his own work, which soon evolved into his unmistakably unique style. His first solo shows came at about the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989; though it wasn't until 2000 that he began to show outside Germany, international success came quickly and many major solo exhibitions followed. Now that Rauch's work is highly sought after and commands great sums, it is only natural that it should be the subject of a serious and large-scale volume. This massive tome features Rauch's best work so far, with approximately 200 large-scale reproductions, analytical texts by Harald Kunde, a personal portrait by Wolfgang Büscher, and a look at the painter from an international perspective by Gary Tinterow.

Neo Rauch

Tinterow, Gary

Büscher, Wolfgang

History & Criticism

Taschen America, LLC

Human alter-reality: The essential overview of Neo Rauch’s art Bursting with radiant and unsettling juxtapositions, Neo Rauch’s paintings are wormholes into worlds of startling psychological power and cultural collisions. His scenes involve the viewer in a history that is at once mythic, intimate, and present. Through a deep consideration of philosophy, art history, literature, and his own dreamscape, Rauch’s paintings depict the precipices of progress and the struggles of communication. Electrified by their rich palettes, Rauch’s fragmented landscapes and timeless characters dance between pop and baroque, social and psychological, graphic and painterly. Born in Leipzig in 1960, Rauch learned his trade behind the Iron Curtain. His influences and interests were shaped by personal hardship and the tumultuous changes of East Germany after the Wall fell. In the late 1980s, having finished his studies at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig, he explored diverse approaches to painting in dialogue with works he encountered by Francis Bacon, the New Wild painters, and the pre-Renaissance painters he saw during his travels in Italy. By 1993, he had arrived at the unique style of intertwining figuration and abstraction that characterizes his oeuvre and has brought him international attention and respect. This monograph is the most inclusive collection of Rauch’s work to date. It offers a generous range of his writings that illuminate the personal, symbolic, and formal complexities of the artist’s world. Wolfgang Büscher’s open and sensitive account of a walk through Rauch’s neighborhood reveals the painter’s compassion and modesty. Harald Kunde tracks Rauch’s stylistic development through its main semantic threads and historical influences. Gary Tinterow draws from his work on Rauch’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum to offer the reader a guide to the symbols that form the painter’s extensive mythology. These essays complement Rauch’s work with nuanced insights while allowing the images room to speak on their own. Within this atlas, readers will discover the rich density and enigmatic openness of Rauch’s paintings. This is the standard TASCHEN edition based on the limited first edition. Text in English, French, and German

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kunde, Harald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kunde, Harald

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kunde, Harald. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Neo Rauch: Works Paper 2003-2004 (English and German Edition)

Matthias Hoch (English and German Edition)

Erwin Wurm: The Artist Who Swallowed the World

Neo Rauch: Selected Works 1993-2012

Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch