A Blog Called Nowhere

These paintings are wetter and juicer then one's I've seen in previous shows... The figures aren't as stiff as I remember them and his palet even seems more complex. I've come 'round to liking Neo Rauch in a big way. So much has been written about this show, here are a few interesting bits I've come across;

"Rauch's fascination with the figure and work-related props allow for a formal exploration, based in part on the properties of paint itself. A glob of paint draped over an arm, for example, or a rake dragged though a patch of grass, leave behind marks and swirls that blur the line between rendered object and reference to the simplicity and necessity of the artist's materials. It is as if the figures enable, or are perhaps in a state of reacting to, their own painted environments."
-Press Release from
Zwirner
"Although he claims "never" to use photographs or "any" pre-existing source, so much of what he paints seems like it comes from somewhere that these claims feel fishy."
-Jerry Saltz
"When Neo Rauch's parents were killed in a train crash, Rauch was six months old, and his father had just entered art school. Rauch has no idea why they chose his unusual name, but the suspicion that some sort of wry art inflection was intended..."
-Alexi Worth
"Jamaica Kincaid once said of her native Antigua that it is a place where the past feels like the present and the present often feels like the past. You get the same sense looking at the work of Neo Rauch"
-Martha Schwendener
"Rauch's disjunctive narratives suggest a world whose comforting order has been shaken apart by unseen and unfathomable forces and subjected to a new logic whose outlines remain obscure. In this, they offer an apt response to the post-Cold War world."
-Eleanor Heartney