Neo Rauch
Regular price $1,500.00Limited Collector's Edition of 1,000 copies, each signed by Neo Rauch
Alter-Reality
The Neo Rauch retrospective
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 in 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.
Only a book of truly epic scale could begin to unpack the emotional, historical, and formal density of Rauch’s canvases. Comprising over 450 pages, including more than 250 large-scale reproductions, this monograph is the most inclusive collection of his work to date. It offers a generous range of writings that illuminate the personal, symbolic, and formal complexities of Rauch’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 of Art 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.
Limited to a total of 1,100 numbered copies signed by Neo Rauch, this book is available as a Collector’s Edition (No. 101-1,100), and also as a Limited Art Edition (No. 1-100) of 100 signed copies, with an original artwork also signed by Rauch.
The artist
Neo Rauch (*1960) graduated from the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) as master student of Bernhard Heisig in 1990. In 1997 he won the art prize of the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper which lead to a first institutional exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig. The breakthrough year was 2000 with a touring exhibition at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and at the Kunsthalle Zürich. Since then he has shown at a variety of venues including the Venice Biennale, a solo show at the Vienna Albertina, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York; in 2010 a major double retrospective simultaneously opened in Leipzig and Munich. Rauch lives and works in Leipzig.
The authors
Gary Tinterow is the newly named director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. During his 27-year tenure at the Metropolitan Museum in New York he organized dozens of exhibitions on European painters of the last two centuries, from Ingres and Gericault to Picasso and Matisse. In 2007 he organized Neo Rauch: Para.
Harald Kunde is director of the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, having previously been director of the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen and the Kunsthaus Dresden. He has worked on numerous exhibitions and publications with contemporary artists, including Atelier van Lieshout, Sophie Calle, Chuck Close, Franz Gertsch, Barbara Kruger, Dan Perjovschi, Neo Rauch, Roman Signer, and Erwin Wurm.
Wolfgang Büscher has written several books, among them the bestsellers Berlin–Moskau: Eine Reise zu Fuß (2003), Asian Absences (2008), and Hartland (2011).
The editor
Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include the Collector’s Editions Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Neo Rauch, Ai Weiwei, Beatriz Milhazes, Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, Glenn Brown, the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs such as the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Neo Rauch
Edition of 1,000Hardcover in clamshell box, 33 x 44 cm, 10.61 kg, 476 pagesISBN 978-3-8228-0872-6
Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)
