Hunting scenes in Leipzig. A man pleads with gallerist Gerd Harry Lybke, saying he's wanted to buy a painting by Neo Rauch for ten years now. Why, please, won't you let me? Later Lybke says that someone else rang him up and said: "I want a Rauch. Doesn't matter from when or what it looks like." Lybke hung up on him.



Neo Rauch, "Nexus". Photo by Uwe Walter. All images courtesy of Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin & David Zwirner, New York

It's all go in gallery Eigen+Art. Neo Rauch is showing ten new large canvasses and two smaller paintings. Naturally thousands of people have come from all over the world to see the exhibition. It's all too much for Rauch. Yesterday he turned down a TV interview. The man asked him what he thought of Leipzig, which is where the painter was born, 46 years ago.

Rauch, the sought-after, the coveted one. "I can't stand the sight of you any more," one of his friends confesses. "What must your enemies think?" Does he have enemies? "Oh yes, they exist. They ask what's the point of all this fifties-era smearing."

Light floods a forest of rust-red iron stilts, a giant, empty warehouse on the site of the Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig. A small, plain inconspicuous steel door leads into a studio where time seems to have stood still, where everything is coated in an invisible patina that freezes things into immobility. Like in Rauch's paintings. They smell of emulsion. A new painting, three by four metres in size, leans against the wall. A key painting from his retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg which starts in November. "The show's 90, 95 percent ready," says Rauch.


Holger Liebs: You've painted a sort of pagoda or mausoleum in which two of your tondi, or round paintings from the nineties, are hanging. Is this a resume of your work?

Neo Rauch: Yes. The tondi are hanging in the temple. The painting is called "Ruckzug" (retreat): it shows a path of retreat. I'm still not entirely sure what I'm retreating from. On the one hand I feel I'm very much on the offensive. I mean I've only just stopped being a young painter and I feel more stable than ever. And yet I sense I'm retreating in some way, and I have to find out where this is going or what brought it about.

This looks like a decampment scene. Equipment and petrol cannisters are piled up along the path, documents have been collected, and there's a relay runner with a torch.

He is revenant who appears in some of my earlier pictures. A figure inspired by one of Goethe's characters (in Faust) the "Boy Charioteer". "Flamelets I scatter too in turn / Waiting to see where they may burn." So he's a source of inspiration for me, who travels through the times and of course should keep away from fuel storage facilities. But not from flammable minds.

In another of your new paintings you depict a sort of state of exhaustion vis-a-vis your constant media presence.

The painting "Interview" shows exactly that: an interview. It is the oldest in the Leipzig exhibition. It's based on a situation like the one we're in now, but I hope this one will assume a different character.

The conversation partners look like they've been poured onto the sofas. Ciphers of boredom, melancholy?

When a conversation doesn't grip me I drift off. The picture shows two highly distracted people in a manipulated situation with two dubious-looking figures standing behind them. The one on the left, who is holding up the journalist almost like a puppet, looks as if it's no longer of this world. It's stepping back into the night black of the window. The other, holding the interviewee, has a distinct look of a painter about him – with a paintbrush in his hand and paint-covered trousers on his body. The goatee beard gives him something of the diabolical.

That means that immediate reality and your experiences do occur in your paintings, if in a coded form.

Of course.



Neo Rauch, "Das Blaue". Photo: Uwe Walter. Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin & David Zwirner, New York

But one can also interpret your paintings as post-modern, as collections of signs and quotations, which are then collaged together in a surrealist operation. So that the search for media references suggests itself. But that would contradict a depiction of personal experience.

Yes and no. I see myself like a theatre director, and my involvement can vary hugely in terms of boldness and invasiveness. It can happen that I just sit back and watch as the scenery takes on a life of its own, when suddenly the things mount up in I way I hadn't intended. Those can be the moments that make this profession special.

But self-expressive, apparently accidental gestures are subject in your paintings to the control of the director.

It's all about having a feeling for the right moment, when cerebral elements have to be reigned in, and when all your plans have to be cut off to let the painting processes take its course. Unclarified zones are necessary, otherwise the painting dries up and becomes totally disinfected. I have to keep making new decisions about when I have to set a caesura in my work and establish disruptive zones. I always do that when I get the feeling that the overly spelled-out bits have tipped the balance.

The excrescences of colour that force their way into the compositions are always, like the paintings themselves, allegories of painting, they point to the process of creation as such. Am I right?

Yes. It should always remain clear that what these aren't incarnations, but, maybe this is a word, incolorations of ideas, and also about impulses. In other words: that's not a figure standing there, not a person, but the colour in this area has coagulated into a person because the author's allowed it to happen. This makes me 100 present in all my figures, also in "Interview". The one is just as much me as the other.

Which leads us to your faces. A lot of the physiognomies are similar. Are your figures also secretly self-portraits as well?

If so, then unconsciously. I am making increasing efforts to extend my physiognomic repertoire. Physiognomic metamorphoses take place through these people (he points to the painting "Retreat"). They can stretch over several finished portraits that are continually being effaced. There've been a lot of great portraits that I've had to say goodbye to because they didn't fit the picture. Apparently the basic theme of my works evokes a certain category of personnel. But there are transitions. I'm interested to see who'll be in in five years.

In fact a lot of people are allowed in right now. Your paintings have become denser, more narrative.

Of course, the more material I add, the denser the narrative structure. That's clear. Whether it's Caspar David Friedrich's "Monk by the Sea" or Max Beckmann's "Descent from the Cross"...

Or dramatic clouds formations and glowing horizons, from 18th century images of sublimity. But also weapons, dynamite, highwaymen and hermits – a fictive keynote of the Apocalypse.

Well it's not capitalist realism. I try to create new categories. It would also be possible to address our day-to-day challenges even more directly. Precisely as a figurative painter it would be possible to take a closer look at the world of sausages and kebabs, and get a completely different take on the problems posed by the extreme right than I would. But that would be journalism, not art.

And that's evidently not what you're striving for. Instead, you're creating an atmosphere of catastrophe.

I don't deny that. First I have turn around and become an observer of my own creations. It's clear there's a problematic core to them that's grounded in the Apocalypse. I approach the phenomena of this world by letting things go through me in a nonhierarchical order, and then putting together private, very personal mosaics from the filtered material. In the best case, this leads to patterns being created that point to something above and beyond what people generally attribute to the things.

You also make increasing use of figures who could come from the 19th century. There are grotesque circus directors and train conductors. One picture shows three researchers, Alexander von Humboldt comes to mind...

... or Friedrich "Turnvater Jahn" (laughs). But what a role the few decades that lie between play. Today we're experiencing a typological kaleidoscope, one that continually leads to new connections, although the material it's made from is familiar enough. You know, those decade faces: typical physiognomies of the 30s or 50s. They keep coming back again and again. So there is this wonderful reserve of seemingly discarded hand-me-down material: tomorrow they'll be all over the place again. It's the same thing with beards. Ten years ago I'd never have thought I'd ever paint someone with a full beard. Back then my boys were all clean-shaven.

You prefer painters with a big B: Bacon, Beuys, Balthus, Barney, Beckmann... The whole history of painting serves as your echo chamber. You don't hide your fascination for old masters, because you don't believe in a heightened form of modernity.

Unfortunately and thank God, because I'm no longer 25. By that I mean that thank God I'm no longer politicised, no longer ideologically fixated. The beauty of ageing is that at some point, nothing is embarrassing any more. I think that to do anything of any substance in art, you have to eliminate the feeling of embarrassment as quickly as possible – embarrassment in artistic terms, I should add. There are great masters who have shown us the way heroically.

Such as?

You mentioned Matthew Barney (website). One wonders: how can he address these circumstances? With the means he uses? And that's just the point: because no one else is doing it. This significance, this very special, abysmal and unlimited, is what makes art what it is. The opposite is the mouth-pursedness of the critically chastened, those who believe they have to defend some kind of a temple, that of concrete art, for example, or of club-oriented pop abstraction. And as soon as a narrative appears somewhere, something that smells like people and artists' sweat, they all scream. Only labile natures always have to walk around on tiptoes. That's the realm of the agitators and political commissars.

Here's a quote from Botho Strauss' "Couples, Passersby": "The earth is peopled equally with angels, devils and gods. Probably we're not alone. Descendants of the heavenly and hellish hordes no doubt crisscross our breasts and thwart our common essence. Could it be that we will soon be taken by a new lust for allegory? A lust for grand incarnations, for the many dreamed-out ideas of our century to become flesh? You can't get as pensive or abstract as we have done in our scientific age without at the end encountering something new. A fresh body will issue from the idea, out of fog and light, and came wafting across towards us." Is that how you see your work?

Wonderful. That's it. Exactly that. As if I'd read it before I painted.

Neo Rauch's current solo show at Galerie EIGEN+ART in Leipzig will continue until December 22, 2006.

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The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on September 13, 2006.

Translation: lp, jab.