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 Buscher, and a look at the painter from an international perspective by Gary Tinterow.