Neo Rauch at Zwirner

 I have only seen Neo Rauch's work twice in my life. I saw his show at The Drawing Center a few years ago and was blown away. It gave me a great feel for how he works. This weekend, I saw Rauch's solo show at Zwirner in Chelsea. I have heard opinions on Rauch from older painters I know, who say that his work feels tired, and he's been doing pretty much the same thing since the 80's. I also have heard the critique that the work is seen very differently by Germans. For example, someone who grew up in Germany in the late 20th century might see the work as using lowbrow aesthetic culture as a crutch. Rauch uses so much visual ephemera from Germany (e.g common German magazines, comic books, illustrations, and advertisements) the work feels similar to how someone young in America might feel about painting that draws from Anime or DeviantArt now. 

I just want to preface my review with some other opinions I have heard, and acknowledge that this review is written by someone who was not able to witness the span of Rauch's whole career,  nor was I able to grow up surrounded by German ephemera, and therefore it is hard for me to be certain whether Rauch was just plainly ripping on German advertisements and fairytales, or whether they were in service of a larger commentary that is unique to Rauch. 

To put it plainly, I think Neo Rauche's work is great, and this show was no exception. Rauch's Drawing Center show informed my understanding of the work significantly, as it was focused on his sketches and had one or two large paintings. His sketches were unbelievably rigorous, showing each hand, face, nose, and foot change in incrementally tiny permutations. Over a single sheet of paper, he might evolve the arm of a character, only to attach the arm to its body once it had been perfected. From what I saw, it seemed that all of the characters in the paintings are developed separately from one another, and their environment. It is this siloed process that creates the trademark coldness of a Rauch painting. 

 Despite the warm color palette and generally expressive brushstrokes, his paintings feel more like collages than interwoven scenery. There are also conflicts in scale that crop up as the painting moves from scene to scene, which gestures at a grouping of desperate actions and characters rather than a wholly unified scene painting. 

I don't feel I can speak to the references because of my lack of lived experience within German culture, although the paintings feel ripe with cultural references. This severely limits my read of the paintings and I can only access them through their relationship to art history. I picked up on some references to fairy-tales, historical allegories, and Germany's change from a pastoral society into an industrialized one. But to my eye, the paintings read as a kind of mechanical surrealism, they lack the heavy-handed psychology that is characteristic of most surreal paintings, and even though they are absurd, they lack the humor that one finds in a Hannah Hoch collage.

I found the manner of brush strokes to be economical and primarily in service of generating the image. There is no structural difference in paint handling throughout the image. While some areas of paint may be brushier and looser than others, none of those changes relate to the actual subject itself (e.g faces are not painted in a way that systematically separates them from the architecture, everything is treated with the same speed and "means to an end" attitude. A stone is painted as carefully as a person) I don't see this as a failure in the work, but I feel that it speaks to the coldness of the work, and reinforces the idea that Rauch's work is not about identity or individual characters. Instead, is focused on using desperate references to create conflicting scenery.

Without giving the work too much credit, one painting that I feel brings Rauch's work beyond mere copy and paste is a painting containing a cell tower and a tiny ancient church. Because the paintings hide the fractures between scenery, it is hard to find the line where one scene changes over into another. Rauch is so precise that this effect must be on purpose, and without projecting onto the work more than it deserves, could be a comment on the subtle changes made day by day as a society shifts from pastoral to industrial, moral to immoral, or politically violent to a progressive society. The 20th century was a period of such radical change it is impossible not to acknowledge that any painter who came into maturity during this time as being heavily influenced by such a rapid shift. While that argument could be made about absolutely anyone, Germany was a literal stage for the political warfare of the 20th century, and I am pretty convinced that Rauch's work is some kind of allegory for that political whiplash.

Neo Rauch should be compared to another German artist, Amelie von Wullfen. Wullfen's work feels warmer, funnier, more experimental, more contemporary than Rauch. Wullfen is also more overt in her references to Germany's dark past. And while I agree that a Wullfen show might be more fun, more poignant, and feel a bit fresher, I see these differences as more of a generational difference between the two, rather than as a failing of Rauch. Cezanne had to walk before Picasso could run. 

Overall, I liked the show. It wasn't groundbreaking in 2021, and it won't change painting more than it already has, but it's a show I would encourage everyone to see.