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Lot Essay
Spanning more than two metres across, Grabung (Excavation) (1999) is a vivid, theatrical example of Neo Rauch’s dreamlike paintings. In the foreground, dramatically foreshortened, a worker leans on a spade. He has dug a shallow bed in the turf, revealing small, streamlined objects which resemble wingless aeroplanes: one of these takes flight under his arm. A more distant figure throws his hands in the air, impossibly intersecting with the man in front. Smoke emerges from a hole in the background, echoing surrounding plumes of yellow foliage. Bright blues, reds, yellows and greens dominate the outdoor scene, lending it the aspect of a mid-century propaganda poster. The word Lichtnung—‘clearing’, or ‘glade’—runs down the right-hand side in jaunty lettering. With its virtuosic staging and tantalising, unresolved sense of narrative, the painting exemplifies the compelling mystery and power of Rauch’s work.
Rauch was born in 1960 in Leipzig, in the German Democratic Republic, to parents who were killed in a train crash when he was just four weeks old. A submerged sense of rupture and cataclysm resounds through his paintings, which read like dramatic allegories but consistently defy interpretation. He assembles his compositions directly, without pre-planning or preparatory drawing. Their characters and scenery arise through a mediative, free-associative process, and are arranged according to pictorial rather than symbolic logic. The vivid blue that leads through the diagonals of Grabung’s figures, fencing and ladder is an example of Rauch’s formal decision-making: so too is the rhyme between the rising smoke and yellow trees, which seem to shift psychedelically between states.
The figures in Grabung are typically uncanny. Posed like mannequins or sleepwalkers, their uniforms suggest the Socialist Realist aesthetics of Rauch’s youth. The central character points his finger towards the earth, reversing the traditional skyward gesture—common to Old Masterly depictions of saints and prophets—that directs the viewer towards higher things. Excavation is a common theme in Rauch’s paintings. Many of his figures are seen digging, unearthing objects from the ground, or pulling eerie creatures from bodies of water. ‘My imagination and vision have always emerged from the mining shafts of my subconscious,’ he has said, ‘and those run in a vertical, not horizontal direction’ (N. Rauch, quoted in S. Russ, ‘Neo Rauch,’ BOMB – Artists in Conversation, 12 December 2014).
Having honed his technical skills at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s, Rauch was exposed to a flood of new visual material following the fall of the Berlin Wall, including Surrealism and Pop art. An encounter with Giotto’s late medieval frescoes in Assisi, Italy, on his first trip beyond the Iron Curtain, was particularly formative. This cultural jolt—an eruption of new and unfamiliar worlds—plays out repeatedly across his canvases. As he rose to prominence as part of the ‘New Leipzig School’ in the 1990s, Rauch’s tableaux were often dressed in palettes of primary colour. As in the present work, intense shadow and disjunctions in scale soon began to play a greater role, with plunging perspectives creating a hypnotic spatial vertigo. In Grabung Rauch delves into profound personal and cultural depths to bring his strange fantasia to the surface, as the answers remain just out of reach.
Rauch was born in 1960 in Leipzig, in the German Democratic Republic, to parents who were killed in a train crash when he was just four weeks old. A submerged sense of rupture and cataclysm resounds through his paintings, which read like dramatic allegories but consistently defy interpretation. He assembles his compositions directly, without pre-planning or preparatory drawing. Their characters and scenery arise through a mediative, free-associative process, and are arranged according to pictorial rather than symbolic logic. The vivid blue that leads through the diagonals of Grabung’s figures, fencing and ladder is an example of Rauch’s formal decision-making: so too is the rhyme between the rising smoke and yellow trees, which seem to shift psychedelically between states.
The figures in Grabung are typically uncanny. Posed like mannequins or sleepwalkers, their uniforms suggest the Socialist Realist aesthetics of Rauch’s youth. The central character points his finger towards the earth, reversing the traditional skyward gesture—common to Old Masterly depictions of saints and prophets—that directs the viewer towards higher things. Excavation is a common theme in Rauch’s paintings. Many of his figures are seen digging, unearthing objects from the ground, or pulling eerie creatures from bodies of water. ‘My imagination and vision have always emerged from the mining shafts of my subconscious,’ he has said, ‘and those run in a vertical, not horizontal direction’ (N. Rauch, quoted in S. Russ, ‘Neo Rauch,’ BOMB – Artists in Conversation, 12 December 2014).
Having honed his technical skills at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s, Rauch was exposed to a flood of new visual material following the fall of the Berlin Wall, including Surrealism and Pop art. An encounter with Giotto’s late medieval frescoes in Assisi, Italy, on his first trip beyond the Iron Curtain, was particularly formative. This cultural jolt—an eruption of new and unfamiliar worlds—plays out repeatedly across his canvases. As he rose to prominence as part of the ‘New Leipzig School’ in the 1990s, Rauch’s tableaux were often dressed in palettes of primary colour. As in the present work, intense shadow and disjunctions in scale soon began to play a greater role, with plunging perspectives creating a hypnotic spatial vertigo. In Grabung Rauch delves into profound personal and cultural depths to bring his strange fantasia to the surface, as the answers remain just out of reach.