Neo Rauch’s antagonistic art

Thomas Meaney | The New Yorker | 27th September 2021

German unification, it seems, is ongoing. Rauch is from the East and while feted in New York, he gets criticism from Berlin. His figurative work, sometimes called arch-traditionalist, reflects his East German training. These works are “huge, dense, ostensibly narrative scenes in which narrative is stubbornly elusive … [recalling] Renaissance art one minute and socialist realism the next … allegories to which Rauch has thrown away the key”.