Neo Rauch: Para

Neo Rauch: para is the bilingual catalogue for the paintings Neo Rauch showed in his 2007 solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The DuMont hardcover has texts by Werner Spies and Gary Tinterow, the Met’s Engelhard Curator of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, in English and German. The show was the Met’s third solo exhibition for a mid-career artist and traveled to the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl. Clare Hurley’s review counts 14 paintings, mostly horizontal compositions made with the Met’s low-ceilinged gallery in mind. The title uses the prefix para, which appears in several of the works and which Rauch uses to call up paranormal, parallel, paradox and similar words. The book also collects more than 40 excerpts from writing about his work over ten years.

Rauch was born in Leipzig in 1960 and studied at the city’s Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. David Zwirner, his gallery, describes paintings of invented characters, settings and motifs that are realistic and enigmatic at once. Hurley notes that his late-1990s paintings, with flat color and schematic figures, imitate early-1960s Socialist Realist storybooks and how-to manuals.