Aus dem Bldem / From the Floor

Aus dem Boden / From the Floor is the catalogue for a 2018-2019 exhibition of works on paper by the German painter Neo Rauch. The Des Moines Art Center and The Drawing Center in New York organized it jointly.

The exhibition brought together more than 150 drawings spanning over three decades of Rauch's career, most previously unseen. Brett Littman, then Executive Director of The Drawing Center, curated it with Jeff Fleming, Director of the Des Moines Art Center, and Amber Harper. It opened at the Des Moines Art Center on September 27, 2018. It then traveled to The Drawing Center, where it ran April 12 through July 28, 2019.

Rauch does not make preparatory sketches. He calls these works dreams on paper: drawings made during intense painting sessions and left on the studio floor for an assistant to file away. He uses the medium to work through his subconscious and to develop the figures and settings of his paintings. The works here range from compositional thumbnails and phone doodles to finished landscape and figure studies.