ASCHERSLEBEN, GERMANY — The colorful, detailed canvases of artist Neo Rauch are a familiar sight at fairs and within public collections around the globe. Yet over the past 20 years, Rauch has produced another body of work that is much lesser-known: a series drawings and color prints. In his early years, the prints were mostly conceived for exhibition posters and invitation cards, continuing a tradition among artists in the former East German for whom prints where a means of exchange and keeping up to date with what other artists where doing. Being a book city, well-trained printers are still abundant in Leipzig; Rauch’s studio is also conveniently located four floors above a print shop.
“The printers carry the stone up from the basement to his studio on the third floor, where he works on it,” Kerstin Wahala of EIGEN+ART, Rauch’s longtime gallery, explains. “When he’s done, they pick it up again and apply another color. Then he works on it again. It’s this slower speed of things in Leipzig that suits him so well.” Wahala perceives the artist as being less pressured when it comes to making prints or drawings compared to the large canvases, which are promised to institutions and collectors long before they have actually been painted.
A mere two-hour drive from Berlin, Neo Rauch’s hometown of Aschersleben holds the painter’s collected works on paper. Set up in 2012 by Rauch and EIGEN+ART, the Grafikstiftung Neo Rauch recently opened its second show. A trip out into the East German province of Saxony-Anhalt helps viewers also to visualize the painter’s enigmatic pictorial worlds, which are deeply rooted in the landscape he grew up in.
But what made the famous artist come back to provincial Aschersleben, let alone donate all his prints of the past and future? The idea came from of the city. Rauch’s former classmate, Christiane Wisniewski, was in charge of Aschersleben’s newly built education center and had unused space at her hands, and approached the gallery about a possible show. At first, the gallery’s reaction was hesitative, but Rauch himself was enthusiastic. He came up with the idea to show works by his master class at the Leipzig Academy in Aschersleben, which proved a success. In 2010, Rauch donated one copy of all his past and future prints to the city. That was followed by setting up a foundation in 2012 with funds from the artist, his gallerist Gerd Harry Lybke, and the city.
Wahala, the gallery‘s co-director who was also born in Aschersleben, became chairwoman of the board. She recalls that each time she and Rauch drove to their hometown, both had the feeling of “driving deeper and deeper into Neo’s paintings, rediscovering our home, our memory blossoming like flowers.” Visitors to the foundation today might encounter similar experiences when driving or taking the train out to the town, crossing countryside, marked by industry, mines and agriculture. It is a landscape which Rauch finds much to his taste, dramatic yet subdued as well. “Through the movement towards and within the city, you can see that the landscape really is like that, just as in the paintings,” Wahala observes. “When your grandmother is the only thing left to you in terms of home,” she adds, noting that Rauch’s parents died when he was just four weeks old, “then one naturally looks for other cornerstones. For Neo, that was Aschersleben.”
Pictorial elements and titles such as “Kalimuna” (2010) directly relate to Aschersleben and the narrations of Rauch’s grandmother, who had worked in a local munitions factory during WWII (the title is a hybrid of the name of the factory, the Muna Depot, and “kali,” a reference for potash, mined for the weapons) . The seemingly dislocated architecture of Rauch’s work is in fact quite real to visitors to the Grafikstiftung, when moving through Aschersleben and the surrounding Harz mountain range. Rauch’s deliberate and persistent proximity to the place where he was born and raised has been eyed suspiciously by critics and other, mostly German, artists. For Rauch, however, it’s simply a precondition of his work. And in contrast to his recent paintings, the reduction to three or four colors and much less detail in his printed works characterize an artist who is very much at ease with that medium – one that is just as deeply rooted in the city of Leipzig as Rauch’s motifs are in the modest but mysterious mountains of the Harz. Behind which the artist recalls, “The inaccessible kingdom of West Germany was to be found.”
Neo Rauch, “The Graphic Work: Part 2” is on view at the Grafikstiftung in Aschersleben, Germany through March 2, 2014.