188 - NEO RAUCH

NEO RAUCH (born 1960 in Leipzig, works there) Arsonist, 1991 Oil on hardboard. 140 x 85 cm. Framed with artist’s molding. Signed and dated (19)91 at the bottom center. Inscribed on the reverse. Provenance: Private collection, Hesse Neo Rauch is the most prominent representative of the New Leipzig School, which combines traditional figurative painting with surreal, dreamlike elements. He has enjoyed international success since the 1990s and has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, as well as in Paris, London, and Berlin. His works are held in numerous renowned collections worldwide. “Semi-abstract work”—that is how Rauch himself described the phase in which his visual language approaches organic, corporeal, and ultimately human forms. “Brandstifter” is at the heart of this phase. A dark, egg-shaped form occupies the left half of the picture. Scattered across its surface are radiant, spiky formations—it remains unclear whether they are thistles, burdocks, or sparks. Figures emerge from a tapestry of gray, olive, pink, and black: in the upper right, a head above a light-colored torso; in the lower left, a slender, rosy figure; and in the lower right, a stooped figure. None of them fully detaches from the painting; each remains half-bound within it. The upper edge of the painting is rendered in deep black, as if something had been consumed there. The title names a perpetrator, yet the fire itself appears nowhere. It is present only as form: in the radiating structures, the black needle-like strokes that stretch across the surface, and in the charred zone at the upper edge. Rauch does not depict the act, but its trace. What emerges here from the paint—figures with a recognizable function but without a discernible plot—would become the core of his painting in the years to come. Even the naming already points ahead: Rauch would later regularly designate his figures according to their function.