Volume 54, Number 14 · September 27, 2007
Magic Show
By Sanford Schwartz
Neo Rauch at the Met: para
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 22–October 14, 2007, and the Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, October 28, 2007–March 30, 2008.
Neo Rauch: para
catalog of the exhibition by Gary Tinterow and Werner Spies
Cologne: DuMont, 115 pp., $35.00
The dreamlike paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch are as mystifying and enigmatic as those of any artist at work today, although his figurative scenes, carnivalesque in their rich, surprising colors and tricky shifts from the real to the fantastic, are also among the likeliest to grab the attention of twelve-year-olds. In pictures marked by a naturalist's precision about light, decor, and weather conditions, and that might be set in a factory office, on a farm at night, by the side of a cliff, or in many places at once, vaguely somnambulistic men (and rarely more than one or two women) can be seen conferring about a document, say, or playing cards, or trudging about in one heavy-going endeavor or another. They might even be caught up in violent incidents, like upheavals in the earth or street demonstrations with flags set on fire—events that occur in a number of the fourteen pictures in a show the artist is currently having at the Metropolitan Museum of work made this year.
Review, 2439 words
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