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Neo Rauch (Leipzig, 1960) is regarded as one of the most important artists of his generation.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, he made a decisive contribution to the repositioning of figuration in painting. At a time when abstraction and conceptual art dominated the discourse, he opted for a radically autonomous, enigmatic visual language in which narrative fragments, historical echoes and visions converge.
His works are the stage for a universe of their own, populated by figures who seem to be acting, waiting, constructing or intervening in a world that is at once recognisable and disrupted. They are not illustrations of reality, but autonomous constellations in which memory, imagination and historical resonance coincide.
Rauch studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig.
There he was trained by, amongst others, Arno Rink. His work shows affinities with surrealism and popular visual culture, and over the years has evolved into a wholly unique universe in which layers of time and perspectives intertwine. His international breakthrough at The Armory Show in New York in 1999 marked a turning point. Since then, his work has been exhibited worldwide, including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Palazzo Pitti, Pinakothek der Moderne and BOZAR. In his wake, Leipzig painting also gained international visibility.
Since then, Rauch has been regarded as a central figure within contemporary figurative art. His oeuvre, rooted in central Germany but collected and exhibited worldwide, has given figurative painting a new relevance.
It is particularly noteworthy that Rauch has built up an extensive body of graphic work since as early as 1988.
These works form a distinct realm in which motifs are condensed, narrative structures are refined, and compositions achieve a high degree of intensity.
The prints reveal how his visual language articulates itself in various stages, from early works in which figures still appear to be in a phase of development, to later works in which the characteristic constellations have fully crystallised. Through the reduction to line, contrast and plane, the image acquires a particular intensity and sharpness.
The exhibition at Museum De Reede presents this graphic trajectory on an exceptional scale, spanning from 1988 to 2026. The five large oil paintings on paper serve as anchor points within the exhibition, linking graphic thinking with monumental painting.
The title ‘Balance’ does not refer to harmony in the classical sense, but to a precarious tension. In Rauch’s work, balance is never static. Figures find themselves on fault lines, between action and stillness, between past and future, between order and disorder.
It is precisely in his prints that this balance becomes strikingly apparent: in the line work, in the composition and in the concentrated narrative core. The exhibition demonstrates how, since 1988, this balance has been sought, found, undermined and reformulated, in a body of work that has consistently accorded figuration a central position within contemporary art.
