Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

In a lakeside scene, a man leans on a graphic of an arrow as if it were a rake handle in the garden; tentacles rise from the shoreline and rectangular speech bubbles hang empty in the yellow sky. In a Dali-esque interior, the corner of a comforter drips off a bed. This major new overview of the work of the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch makes, once again, the case that he is one of the most important artists of his generation. He remains committed to putting brush on canvas in an age when digital media are gaining ground, and among a crowd of similarly dedicated colleagues, he stands out at the forefront. While his work of the 1980s was influenced by Expressionism, his more recent portfolio revels in a new take on Socialist Realism, clearly shaped by the experience of growing up in the former East Germany. Rauch riffs on the once-mandated styles of his youth and on western abstraction from the second half of the twentieth century, all in coloration and figuration that directly allude to the Socialist past. Between cartoon styling and historic technique, he has found a distinctive style, palette and concept. These dreamlike sequences feel both timeless and deeply rooted: Rauch gathers figures from the past in surreal landscapes and interiors to tell enigmatic stories about the present.… (mere)

Published to accompany an exhibition of the artist’s work in 2005 -2006 titled Eberhard Havekost – Harmonie, Paintings 1998-2005. Following the foreword the three main chapters are titled Image Space / Conceptual Space – Havekost’s Painting as a Science of Images, User Interfaces, and Destiny – A New Series of Works by Eberhard Havekost. In addition there is a catalogue of works in the exhibition and a bibliography. The text, which is printed side by side in English and German, generally discusses the artist’s work in terms of approach and use of the computer for photographic manipulation, painting technique, and in addition a more subjective analysis of the individual pieces.

The major part of the book is devoted to the images themselves, in total 126 of which 103 are in colour. They vary in size but many are half-page or full-page, and there are several fold-out pages which accommodate either panoramic formats or allow for a sequences of related works to be shown together.

This is a well produced book, and the presentation is sympathetic to the Havekost’s work, which generally comprises very clean, simplified yet often slightly distorted views of what is otherwise very familiar. The choice of cover illustration does seem a trifle odd as it is not typical of the bulk of the work in the exhibition, and I did find some of the subjective discussion of the paintings a little pretentious or even patronising; but for the quality and quantity of the illustrations it is well worth while.… (mere)