Neo Rauch saw his artistic breakthrough in the 1990s, an era in which he laid the foundations for an enormous oeuvre that oscillated between figuration and abstraction, between Socialist Realism and Pop Art, between clearly legible iconographic references and seemingly irresolvable enigmas. Back in 2006, at the opening of the first major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg "Neo Rauch. Neue Rollen. Bilder 1993 - 2006", the 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' celebrated Rauch as the "superstar of contemporary painting". "Without him, there would be no "New Leipzig School", regardless of whether it is a school at all, and you have to search for a long time to find another painter in the generation after Baselitz, Hockney, Kiefer, Richter, and Polke who even comes close to Rauch, who was born in Leipzig in 1960. At best, Luc Tuymans explores the no-man's-land between figuration and abstraction with comparable intensity [..]. (quoted from: ibid.). Solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York followed in 2007. The present work "Mal" is a particularly early and groundbreaking composition, as it already has everything that would characterize Rauch's painterly work from then on, that is the virtuoso combination of figurative and painterly elements, of symbolism and enigma, and the aspect of artistic self-reflection, which has remained a key feature of Rauch's oeuvre to this day. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, most of Rauch's pictures were still deserted or just sparsely inhabited. In this respect, too, the present large-format painting on paper is groundbreaking for everything that was to follow after the turn of the millennium. While Neo Rauch is regarded as a shy, melancholic artist who is extremely reluctant to reveal anything about himself and his art, it is precisely his complex and ultimately always enigmatic pictorial inventions, as in the present work with the meaningful title "Mal", that bring Rauch's reflections on the significance of the artist and painting to the outside world. Rauch always focuses on power games, ideas of authority, and autonomy. "[..] he once came up with the idea of the artist as a child sitting in a playroom and gathering the toys around him in ever new constellations." (Peter Guth, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1997).
In the present work, this imagery of the child at play is combined with the traditional imagery of the fateful moment characterized by its fragility and fleetingness. And so Rauch's playful child does not stand firmly on the ground but, like famous Fortuna personifications, on a moving toy cart. Only a few years after the end of the GDR, Rauch combined all of these elements with the imagery of the fountain and the parting of hair to create a complex contemporary allegory, thus adding to a long pictorial tradition that dates back to early modern Italian art and art theory. The intensive visual examination of his artistic personality as well as the genesis, function, and meaning of painting has had a decisive influence on Rauch's unique oeuvre to this day. [JS]