22 July to 18 October, 2015
Schaumainkai 63 60596 (at Dürerstraße)
Frankfurt am Main, Germany +49 69 6050980

Frankfurt’s 200-year-old Städel Museum used its impressive 2012 extension to revisit the somewhat unfashionable work of the last generation of artists to come to prominence in the west of a divided Germany. 97 mostly large works by painters born shortly after the war are set out in a mixture of geographic and thematic groupings, which keeps the flow healthily unpredictable: Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg as the main centers, and self-portraits, the body and politics as subject orientations. As in the US and Italy, this era’s expressive figurative painters — dubbed the Junge Wilde (“Wild Youth”) — were seen as an antidote to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and had their moment in the market before the crash of 1987.

Many of these works haven’t been exhibited since then, and only Martin Kippenberger (who died in 1997) and maybe Albert Oehlen have maintained comparable profiles. Otherwise, the mantle of figurative significance has reverted to generations before (Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter) and after (Neo Rauch and the Leipzig school). This show demonstrated that the work, though diverse, benefits from being seen together; that there are more connections than might be assumed with the preceding and succeeding generations; and that it’s worth looking again at a wider spread of the 27 artists included.

How coherent are these paintings, seen as a group? The majority can be described as loosely and somewhat aggressively painted, trading on the apparent speed of execution, with plenty of ambiguity. Maybe it’s me reading backwards to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ended the period covered, but I also found myself drawn into the frequency with which apparent contradictions — of visual languages or content — are brought together in the same painting, as if reflecting the divided nation. That’s to be expected in the section labelled “The Political Collage.” But other rooms feature the phenomenon as well, as in works such as Volker Tannert’s Small Ceremony for the Modern (1982), in which Albert-Speer-like floodlights illuminate a post-war skyscraper, and Gerard Kever’s Untitled (1982), which combines “televised” clouds with “real” ones. A particularly striking example is KaDaWe (1981), a vast (340 x 483 cm) collaboration by Salomé and Luciano Castelli, which adopts and subverts capitalist modes of display by depicting the artists in performance, mimicking the “poses” of meat hanging over a department store butcher’s counter. Kippenberger is the master of this mode, and all four of his works here conjoin disparate elements: Two Proletarian Women Inventors on their Way to the Inventors’ Congress (1984) shows the pair on their way to collect an “innovation award” — which was probably for something already well-established in the West — set against both a Malevichian monochrome and a swirling Abstract Expressionist background, mocking all ideologies equally.

The break from preceding modes doesn’t seem extreme in retrospect. Most of the subjects are straight from the lives of the artists: punk music, sex, the city, painting itself. When the Mülheimer Freiheit group (named for the address of a Cologne studio shared by Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger) give things a kitchily surreal twist, it’s to no radical effect.

The precedents of the Expressionist generation are often explicit: Rainer Fetting’s Large Shower (1981) puts Ernst Ludwig Kirchner figures into a gay sauna; and Egon Schiele is summoned by the quintessentially 1980s pre-VCR action of Werner Büttner’s Self-Portrait Masturbating in a Cinema, which neatly inverts the “paintbrush as penis” trope. A landscape by Berndt Zimmer, Field, Rape (1979), is close to color field abstraction. Walter Dahn’s Double Self (1982) reminded me of David Hockney’s early ‘60s work, when what would become Pop was still messy. And Milan Kunc is close to later mainstream Pop. Looking forward, the artists of the Leipzig school have continuities with their ‘80s forebears, many of whom taught them, though they generally paint with more clarity and a different historical awareness: more a unification of previously competing tendencies, less a tendency to accept clashes within a painting.

Who deserves more attention? There’s nothing here to challenge the primacy of the group who studied together in Hamburg, where Sigmar Polke taught Georg Herold, Werner Büttner, the Oehlen brothers and, of course, Kippenberger; but the geographic picture is complicated by Kippenberger’s move to Berlin in 1978. Bettina Semmer was in that circle, too, and she (along with G.L. Gabriel) emerged as the most substantial female presence in a rather male scene. Each of Semmer’s three contributions are striking in different ways, and though this show doesn’t look at what these artists — most of them still practicing — did next, her subsequent work is also varied and interesting. Tannert (a student of Richter) and Andreas Schulze impress, too, though the latter’s paintings have a monumental stillness rather at odds with the tenor of the show.

The prevailing intensity edges into the histrionic in the weaker works, and the free markmaking becomes more vague than dynamising. Can the so-called 80ers, as a whole, be defended as deliberately practicing “Bad Painting,” which opposes the idea of harmonious art, whether traditional or avant-garde? Kippenberger, as with a naïvely conventional portrait sharpened by the title Mother of Joseph Beuys (1984), delivers persuasively to that agenda. So does Oehlen: two of his works here allow mirrors to disrupt the illusionistic space of the painting, knowingly undermining the established codes. And in Moonlight Falling into the Fuehrer’s Headquarters (1982), they also reflect his viewers back into a space containing a swastika. As the show’s curator, Martin Engler, says, “Contexts are consciously ruptured. The moment of dissolution becomes the content of the image.” I don’t sense the same analytic justification for the apparent badness in all cases, so that I can’t see this show bringing the likes of Helmut Middendorf and Salomé back to international attention. Indeed, perhaps the museum implicitly acknowledges a more national audience by not translating the catalogue into English — as it does those for most shows. None of that, though, detracts from a fascinating and superbly presented time capsule of a survey.

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English-born artist Rupert Goldsworthy has followed an eclectic path over the past two decades. Living mostly in Berlin or — as at present — New York, he’s spread his energies across writing, researching and curating, as well as his own art, and has run project spaces in both cities. There are clear continuities across all those activities, though: the history of political activism and AIDS; an interest in how different communities interrelate; and an ongoing investigation into how images are reused and what they stand for. His book, CONSUMING//TERROR: Images of the Baader-Meinhof (2010), for example, traces the visual history of the Red Army Faction (the West German terror group) and their logo. His last exhibition at Ritter/Zamet, in 2012, used image sources as diverse as medicine packaging, stickers from street art, and his own photographs of signs and monuments to juxtapose the old and new communities in the Neukölln area of Berlin.

Everything in Goldsworthy’s current show was made onsite during a month’s residency at the gallery. The floor dominates: it was undisguisedly hand-painted with typically North African tile-like patterns. Combined with the natural light filtering through the small gallery’s roof, Mosque Floor generates the atmosphere of a courtyard and makes for an environment that — true to his interdisciplinary form — provides the platform for events with guest artists, musicians and writers.

The images around the courtyard are predictably varied. The most striking and conventionally painted is Clone Moustache, a looming close-up of part of a face with bushy hair completely covering the mouth. That suggests secrecy or a failure of communication, as well as membership of the 1970’s Castro-clone scene, a culture driven by extreme promiscuity. Both aspects fit the text paintings Mineshaft Dress Code and The Coleherne, which adopt a painterly photographic halftone dot format, similar to Sigmar Polke’s, to depict a crowd outside a notorious 1970s London leather club. The text is a word-for-word enamel reproduction of the club’s amateurishly hand-written dress code notice, which Goldsworthy has blown up to the scale of a man’s body. New York’s Mineshaft was among the first sex clubs to be closed by the city during the AIDS crisis, and according to Goldsworthy, its dress rules were well known in gay lore. The list is fascinating, featuring as it does both what can be worn (biker leathers, western gear, uniforms) and what can’t (suits, rugby shirts, disco drag and, surprisingly, cologne or perfume).

If those three paintings suggest nostalgia for the pre-AIDS freedoms of the ‘70s, albeit tinged by what came later, then Anita and Brian takes us back a little further: in a red and black graphic style that imitates a printing process, we see Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones in Nazi uniforms. That puts us in 1969, just before Jones was found dead in

his swimming pool. Finally, Bull appropriates an early 20th century cartoon about the plight of Armenians, then adds a painterly splatter of bloody color. Several copiously moustached men strive to push a bull off a cliff: impending disaster is now visibly present.

The overall effect is more allusive than systematic, but we might think not just about AIDS, but more generally about how one culture imitates or opposes another, or how visual representations help form cultural identities, or whether the various patterns of collapse referenced — not just the end of the pre-AIDS sex scenes, but the dissolution of Ottoman Turkey, the fall of the Third Reich, and the endpoint of Western colonialism suggested by the floor’s expansion of Islamic influence — have any commonalities.

All that makes for a fascinating and emotional installation. London is very different now, and as an ex-pat visiting his hometown this year after three decades abroad, Goldsworthy talks of finding a sad irony in the double erasure of its recent history: first the decimation of his generation by AIDS, and then gentrification. You do, though, need the background provided by Goldsworthy to pick that up, else all you get is disparate work with an aura of potential linkage. Other artists — de Chirico and Rauch, for example — make a virtue of frustrating our desire to make logical connections, but integrate their choices in a distinctive painterly language. Goldsworthy is a chameleon painter, choosing styles to match his sources. That may be thematically appropriate, but it does sacrifice that sense of the artist’s own visually coded world, which makes for more immediate appreciation.

The post Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: The Histories of Rupert Goldsworthy appeared first on artcritical.

NEO RAUCH
David Zwirner Gallery until June 21
533 W.19th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-727-2070

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 22, 2008 under the heading “Back to Basics”

What should be made of the conservatism of artists such as Walton Ford and Neo Rauch, who are subjects of shows of new work in Chelsea right now?

The art world that prizes these men’s work is a self-consciously cutting edge milieu that is far removed from political conservatism, and yet these artists’ success is thanks in no small measure to bravura displays of skill in traditional idioms, to a fond nostalgia for past worlds that produced such styles and the competence to execute them.

Pictures by Mr. Ford in particular would feel at home in a wood-paneled gentleman’s club, amidst brandy, cigars, leatherbound volumes, even if right now they are to be seen in well-lit white cube art gallery that betokens very different cultural values.

While there is an element of irony in both men’s work, this comes across in specific instances of wit rather than in relation to technique. Theirs is not a camp act of adopting a passé style in order to poke fun at style, per se, as might be the case with, say, John Currin, or with the conceptually-driven, deliberately anachronistic style revivals of the 1980s, which themselves looked back to early modernist provocateurs like de Chirico and Picabia, not to mention Picasso.  Games with style were key to modernism and postmodernism alike, whereas an artist such as Mr. Ford seems beyond postmodernism in his willingness to inhabit a stylistic past.

He is an animalier who works in watercolor and other graphic mediums to render exotic or extinct creatures in meticulous detail and an old-fashioned hand that recall historic sources from between the 16th and 19th centuries. His creatures, who include in his show at Paul Kasmin Gallery a Persian tiger, bison, bears, a rhinoceros, and game birds, are placed in tableaux appropriate in different ways to each.

Sometimes it is a diorama-like backdrop, such as the snowy vista that is home to the bison in “Tur” (2007). Other times, the scene provides the narrative element, as in “Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros” (2008), which imagines the poor animal, tethered to a mast, about to go down with the ship transporting him to the Pope in Rome. This was the beast subsequently depicted from secondary sources by Dürer whose print would serve as prototype for representations of the animal for hundreds of years afterwards despite its zoological inaccuracies.

“Malmaison” (2008) has two game birds — a southern caissowny and a dwarf emu in battle — as a legend on the picture in the artist’s characteristic copper plate handwriting informs us. That the birds a jousting in the grounds of Malmaison reads as an allegory for the Napoleonic Wars.

The chief formal characteristic that prevents these images from registering as mere pastiche is scale. “Malmaison” for instance, is a page of five by ten feet, a size unprecedented for a drawing of the time in which this bird fight might have taken place. The six works in the show are roughly this size, which is typical for the artist. These are sumptuous works, but their principal appeal is to the craft with which they were put together, or else to a raw sense of pathos or identification with the animals depicted. That the images are invented rather than merely appropriated adds kudos to the artist’s skill and imagination, but still, at the risk of missing the point and sounding philistine, this project seems more about artistry than art.

The phenomenal rise of Neo Rauch, a painter who trained at Leipzig’s Academy of Graphic Arts under the old German Democratic Republic, adds a historical twist to any consideration of the new appeal of artistic conservatism. Like the awe reserved for Chinese artists trained by sometime socialist realists, there is a perverse nostalgia at play for the disciplines of totalitarian art in the special welcome accorded to former East German painters. A misplaced sense that the graduates of these reactionary academies really knew how to paint and draw even if the murals they were trained to produce were a hideous anachronism recalls the old line about fascism, that at least the trains ran on time.

Of course, there is also a liberal triumphalist sense that, freed from ideological strictures, these artists can now uniquely exploit the ironic implications of their received skill sets.

Mr. Rauch’s idiom is primarily 19th century, with a heady brew of realism and romanticism, while the time frame of his dramas is mostly mid-20th century. “Der Garten des Bildhauers” (2008) (The Garden of the Builders) depicts sinister goings-on amid farm buildings with corpses being carried away under an ominous night sky. To those who have followed the artist’s development, this picture is a self-reflective commentary on his stylistic shift from mid-century illustration to more old masterly and painterly look, although in this image, in a funny way, the “progress” is in the opposite direction. A projected light is seen to peel across the canvas, from the bottom left corner, as it were cleaning the surface, transforming the scene from painterly realism to graphic illustration.

Mr. Rauch is a prodigious talent.  His canvases are lush with painterly dexterity, compelling characterization, and compositional intrigue. But, as with Mr. Ford’s animal portraits, there is more about these costume dramas that transports viewers back to the amalgamated past they never knew — the very definition of nostalgia — than truly puts them in touch with a sense of being here and now.

What belongs more to the 20th century are the dislocations of time and scale, though even in respect of these, the viewer is still safely within a stylistic comfort zone: in “Entfaltung” (2008) (Development) — like many of the 11 canvases in this show an elaborate if confounding allegory of art making — there are figures of differing period costume, size, and spatial position, with weird cutout shapes repeating across the image, whether proffered by disembodied hands popping out of the sky or cut from a page by an earnest youth in boy scout uniform. But the point of reference here is as much Renaissance painting as it is Surrealism, Pop Art, or postmodernism. Even when he is being disconcerting, in other words, he offers a familiar experience of the disconcerting.

The post Walton Ford at Paul Kasmin Gallery and Neo Rauch at David Zwirner Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, May 24, 2007 under the heading “Where’s the Smoke?”

Like the eighteenth century German neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs, Neo Rauch seems to have been born with a prophetic moniker, or at least a name to live up to.  While Raphael is the Renaissance master Mengs most clearly emulated, Neo is perfectly forenamed for an artist in whom, to paraphrase architectural theorist Charles Jencks, the wasms have become an ism.  Mr. Rauch’s paintings, fusing elements of romanticism and realism from the last two centuries, resist the idea that anachronism and rejuvenation might be at odds with one another.

His bright and chirpy, skillfully executed, enigmatically jumbled costume dramas are the subject of a condensed show at the Met, in an inhospitable, bunker-like mezzanine gallery, the third in an annual series devoted to young(ish) contemporaries.  His forebears, both Americans, were Tony Oursler and Kara Walker.  The first foreigner in the series is one of the hottest stars of the international revival of traditional painterly technique.  Painting with self-consciously hackneyed yet bravura panache, but in iconographically complex compositions, Mr. Rauch is a thinking person’s John Currin.

Emerging in the mid-1990s, Mr. Rauch stands at the head of what is dubbed the Leipzig School (other luminaries include Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe and Matthias Weischer) of artists centered around that city’s renowned Academy of Graphic Arts.  Isolated by the East German regime from overt influences of contemporary art, the Academy offered a solid – if stolid – grounding sanctioned by social realism.

What makes Mr. Rauch something of an east-west divan (traditionalist and modernist) is the way he merges realist painterly language – whether exploiting familiar tropes or arising from inventive observation – with a collage sensibility.  Even when his figures or scraps of scenery might not, actually, have been appropriated from a specific source, the inchoate jumble, the disaffection between figures, or at least their lack of organic connection, makes his paintings seem[end italic] as if they are collaged.  While his self-professed conservatism keeps his oddball composition shy of the subversions of full-blown Surrealism, the incongruities in which he delights bring Max Ernst’s collage novels to mind.  Similarly, his scenes are too overtly historical to share Pop Art’s critique or celebration of contemporaneous mass culture, but his chirpy, lush collisions of objects and scenarios can recall James Rosenquist.

The present show is titled “para” on account of the artist’s observation of a number of words dependent on that prefix: The paranormal, the paranoid. Mr. Rauch’s work reflects the two political extremes to the service of which the received language of realism submitted in Twentieth Century art – the libertarian, individualist and unconscious in Surrealism and the authoritarian, collective and conformist in social realism.  Mr. Rauch’s ambiguous imagery comes across equally as whimsical and personal, on the one hand, and concerned with history and big philosophical ideas on the other.  “The Next Move” (all 2007) is a triple pun in German, as “Der nächste Zug” can also refer to a train or a drag of a cigarette.  The painting shows two young men in the antiquated garb of a college fraternity (white jackets with blue lapels) smoking and playing cards.  To the left, a canopied table, with “PARA” inscribed on it, supports a painter’s palette, an open book, and other creative accoutrements.  Figures lounging on a bed in the background could be an artist and his model taking an amorous break from painting and posing.

There is frequently a figure of an artist or an intellectual lost in reverie as strange events unfold around him, making these works at one level allegories of painting and its historical dilemmas.  In “The Fugue”, a painting of approximately ten foot high by fourteen wide, this figure is reading, dressed in olden days costume, but  seated on a contemporary moulded plastic chair.  The shed behind him, with its graffiti, is also of our own time.  Above him, dancing in the sky as if caught in the Rapture, are three figures, including women in a purple and a red dress that almost fuse, Siamese style, bound or separated by a flash of light.  In the center of the composition, firemen, also in vintage attire, struggle with unwieldy hoses.  There is no obvious fire for them to tend, but instead a bemused giant with defiant, burly features emerging, with a chain in one arm, from a caesura in the ground.  On the horizon sits a dormant volcano.

Within his short career, Mr. Rauch has already undergone one very significant shift.  His work of the 1990s borrowed from early twentieth century graphic illustration sources and gained both nostalgia and the frisson of dubious political provenance from this quality of printed propaganda.  His palette tended towards the pastel while his brushstrokes had the neat, dry simplicity of graphic reproduction.  His work of this period bore a striking resemblance to early R.B. Kitaj paintings derived from and basking in similar sources.

But recently Mr. Rauch has gone more painterly and more art historically referential.  There are nods to Romantic forebears like Georg Friedrich Kersting in some of the more charming, smaller compositions.  The more disturbing touchstones, stylistically, are National Socialist and DDR realists.  While Mr. Rauch’s affinity with such sources is mitigated by his forceful sense of irony and enigma – qualities that were inimical to propaganda painting – there is a troublesome way, reflecting no doubt an intellectual pendulum swing from the strictures of the old DDR, that Mr. Rauch quotes liberally from writers who accommodated themselves to the Third Reich, like Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger, in his often cryptic interviews.

As befits a man named Neo, these paintings are – at least in initial impact – fresh, vigorous, intriguing and fun. But the more generalized old masterliness of these new works can seem meretricious, loosing the purposefulness of his earlier quotes of graphic sources.  Also, it is the fate of the willfully anachronistic that, while trying to look older, they recall something more recent.  In Mr. Rausch’s case, that would be the last go round with art historical retrofitting, the revivals of the 1980s.  In particular, his portentuous period-piece jumbles are a dead ringer for the Scottish neo-expressionist Steven Campbell.

But these paintings are such rich, heady brews you really want to believe that their mystery is not mere mystification.  An image like “Suburb,” with its flag burners amidst an ominously placed red missile in a calmly drab Mitteleuropa suburban street, or “The Flame,” with a man strapped to planks, dragging a pail of painter’s materials in his wake and marching in a way that forms a St Andrew’s cross, with a chemical-industrial flame on the horizon, have the viewer rooting for meaning.  With all the flames amidst the mystification you can only ask, can there beRauch[end italic] (smoke) without fire?

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May 9-June 18, 2005

Neo Rauch is a prolific artist whose skill is put to the service of his imagination.  His large-scale, often mural size paintings at David Zwirner might seem to employ the usual grab bag of tricks other painters use, but Rauch sets himself apart with his jarring and unusual sense of space and forced perspective.  He leaves areas deliberately unrefined so that the paintings bear a real physical relationship to the act of painting and paint itself—an odd mixture for someone whose project rests so firmly upon allegory.  Shifts in scale and fragmented spaces collide.  He intuitively understands the function of these traditional devices and deliberately subverts them in an affirmation of the senses.

Rauch reinforces the disconnect his characters play in his works by bringing attention to the disjuncture between narrative representation and narration.  His coolly removed figures, prisoners, revelers, red-coated soldiers, children, and various other assortments and breeds serve as a sort of syntax in these arrangements.  He supplies us with a language and through his peculiar interpretation of painting’s classic tenets dismisses any conclusive story.  The pieces come off as highly idiosyncratic yet familiar, simultaneously loose and rigid and almost always appealing.

All of Rauch’s nearly fatalistic narrative structures are possessed with the weight of history, demise and decay.   Much has been made of his origins in Leipzig and that city’s past and influence on him and a whole new hot generation of artists.  While the legacy of East Germany and failed Communist regimes surely plays a hand in the nostalgia of some of these works, there remains a sense that this artist is not defined by borders and boundaries built from socio-political histories. He has transcended these events, these places.  He is caught in a whirl of ideas, concentrated yet unattached.  While there is an ease with which he paints, one continually gets snagged on something in his pictorial inventions.  His comic style is infused with an affected naturalism.  This affectation may well be just a shorthand the artist has developed, which, one assumes, helps him in being so productive.  Given this, it is surprising how unpredictable his paintings seem.

Whatever their source—Soviet-era propaganda or circus sideshow—all these pieces are situated in specific landscapes.  Chosen locations reverberate the function of the scene.  Rauch brings mise-en-scene to a head in his chosen medium.  This device also alludes literally to the land, a sort of grounding of all the confusion and dreams.  His compositions are elegiac, anticipating the somnambulist’s awakening.  Rauch’s imagination is the site of agency that propel these latest works into a deeply interconnected world.  It’s hard to claim that someone with so much recent success can be in any way outside of a system, an outlaw.  Yet he demonstrates that artistic power resides with those who can dare to invent and think and dream and reinvigorate our senses from a hazy and image-weary sleep.

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