- 42
Neo Rauch
Estimate
250,000 - 350,000 GBP
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Description
- Neo Rauch
- Erwerb (Acquisition)
- signed and dated 98
- oil on canvas
- 100 by 70cm.
- 39 1/4 by 27 1/2 in.
Provenance
Galerie Eigen + Art, Berlin/Leipzig
Private Collection, Berlin
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 12 October 2007, Lot 61
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Private Collection, Berlin
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 12 October 2007, Lot 61
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Condition
Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original.
Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Very close inspection reveals a minor and stable hairline crack to the centre of the top half of the canvas. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
Catalogue Note
"With a shudder I open the various contamination chambers and remove a variety of material from them to temporarily store it in the territories of my paintings."
The artist in conversation with Juan Manuel Bonet, Exhibition Catalogue, Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Neo Rauch, 2005, p. 76.
The bold scarlet hues and architectonic space which announce Erwerb's Art Gallery as grocery store immediately juxtapose mundane familiarity with the assertively unreal. Purposefully and masterfully working the thickly textured paint Rauch replicates the look of a German Expressionist woodcut to invoke a dialogue about consumerism in the new East Germany - an inference directly referenced by the title. Effortlessly melding various German histories of image making and technique to underpin a seemingly daily scene with a strange subversiveness, Rauch here attempts to make sense of the overnight switch from Communism to Capitalism in his native Leipzig.
The master of restrained, ironic understatement, Neo Rauch leads the viewer to peer awkwardly into a what looks to be a confusion between a commercial art gallery and a supermarket, with smarly dressed people calmly waiting in line to collect their art rations. The identity of the queuing characters here is mysterious and it is unclear whether they are autonomous figures or marionettes directed by a separate authority. The back of one figure, cropped in the right foreground by the window frame, suggests that the queue extends out of sight around the interior of the building. Their portraits are bleak and evasive, blankly staring downwards or into the middle-distance. That arms are folded and bags lie dormant on the ground suggests that the queue is stationary: the static boredom of their bodily expressions imbues the scene with a certain numbing paralysis.
At the head of the line, a man surveys a painting containing the simplified portrayal of a face while the shelves behind the counter carry similar panels. The sheet in the window, the sculptures and a large hanging painting all also illustrate this basic physiognomy, though each is subtly different. Variations of the face appear in several other contemporaneous paintings of 1998 including Geschäft and Wahl, whose titles respectively translate as "transaction" and "choice". Erwerb translates as "acquisition" and like Geschäft and Wahl connotes the processes of exchange and trade. The title thus provides thematic coherence: Geschäft, Wahl, and Erwerb are lexical signposts of a free market. Born in Leipzig in 1960, Rauch was completely surrounded by the controlled market economy of East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell at the end of 1989 and the Soviet Union finally collapsed two years later. Training at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig between 1981 and 1986, concepts like transaction, choice and acquisition were wholly constrained by the socio-economic restrictions of the GDR.
Rauch calls his paintings "pictures from our collective archive" while Lynne Cooke has labelled his corpus "Cryptic and enigmatic in relation to cause, purpose and ambition, it cleaves a precarious path between the twin dangers of nostalgia for a lost idyll, an edenic world of social unity and communality, and a blanket condemnation of present conditions as riddled by anomie and despair, moral, social and psychological" (Lynne Cooke in Exhibition Catalogue, Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, Neo Rauch, 2002, p. 6). Rauch possesses an exceptional facility to allegorize the biography of his nation, and this painting captures the hesitant psychology of a post-communist 1990s. Norman Rosenthal has labelled Cold War Eastern Europe "a social time warp - a collage of industrial production and a style of life that made a pretence of no tomorrow, whilst in Germany at least, maintaining in many fields, a genuine, cultural integrity. It resulted in a productive amalgam of lies and truths that gave a peculiar edge to irony and perception" (Herwig Guratzsch, Ed., Neo Rauch, Leipzig 1997, p. 15). Erwerb is an assessment of observation and Rauch challenges the viewer's capacity to compute information. Rauch's iconography demands close attention, frequently revealing a paranormal subtlety that mirrors the extraordinary inconsistencies occupying our everyday lives.
The artist in conversation with Juan Manuel Bonet, Exhibition Catalogue, Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Neo Rauch, 2005, p. 76.
The bold scarlet hues and architectonic space which announce Erwerb's Art Gallery as grocery store immediately juxtapose mundane familiarity with the assertively unreal. Purposefully and masterfully working the thickly textured paint Rauch replicates the look of a German Expressionist woodcut to invoke a dialogue about consumerism in the new East Germany - an inference directly referenced by the title. Effortlessly melding various German histories of image making and technique to underpin a seemingly daily scene with a strange subversiveness, Rauch here attempts to make sense of the overnight switch from Communism to Capitalism in his native Leipzig.
The master of restrained, ironic understatement, Neo Rauch leads the viewer to peer awkwardly into a what looks to be a confusion between a commercial art gallery and a supermarket, with smarly dressed people calmly waiting in line to collect their art rations. The identity of the queuing characters here is mysterious and it is unclear whether they are autonomous figures or marionettes directed by a separate authority. The back of one figure, cropped in the right foreground by the window frame, suggests that the queue extends out of sight around the interior of the building. Their portraits are bleak and evasive, blankly staring downwards or into the middle-distance. That arms are folded and bags lie dormant on the ground suggests that the queue is stationary: the static boredom of their bodily expressions imbues the scene with a certain numbing paralysis.
At the head of the line, a man surveys a painting containing the simplified portrayal of a face while the shelves behind the counter carry similar panels. The sheet in the window, the sculptures and a large hanging painting all also illustrate this basic physiognomy, though each is subtly different. Variations of the face appear in several other contemporaneous paintings of 1998 including Geschäft and Wahl, whose titles respectively translate as "transaction" and "choice". Erwerb translates as "acquisition" and like Geschäft and Wahl connotes the processes of exchange and trade. The title thus provides thematic coherence: Geschäft, Wahl, and Erwerb are lexical signposts of a free market. Born in Leipzig in 1960, Rauch was completely surrounded by the controlled market economy of East Germany until the Berlin Wall fell at the end of 1989 and the Soviet Union finally collapsed two years later. Training at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig between 1981 and 1986, concepts like transaction, choice and acquisition were wholly constrained by the socio-economic restrictions of the GDR.
Rauch calls his paintings "pictures from our collective archive" while Lynne Cooke has labelled his corpus "Cryptic and enigmatic in relation to cause, purpose and ambition, it cleaves a precarious path between the twin dangers of nostalgia for a lost idyll, an edenic world of social unity and communality, and a blanket condemnation of present conditions as riddled by anomie and despair, moral, social and psychological" (Lynne Cooke in Exhibition Catalogue, Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum, Neo Rauch, 2002, p. 6). Rauch possesses an exceptional facility to allegorize the biography of his nation, and this painting captures the hesitant psychology of a post-communist 1990s. Norman Rosenthal has labelled Cold War Eastern Europe "a social time warp - a collage of industrial production and a style of life that made a pretence of no tomorrow, whilst in Germany at least, maintaining in many fields, a genuine, cultural integrity. It resulted in a productive amalgam of lies and truths that gave a peculiar edge to irony and perception" (Herwig Guratzsch, Ed., Neo Rauch, Leipzig 1997, p. 15). Erwerb is an assessment of observation and Rauch challenges the viewer's capacity to compute information. Rauch's iconography demands close attention, frequently revealing a paranormal subtlety that mirrors the extraordinary inconsistencies occupying our everyday lives.