Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch was born in 1960 in Leipzig, where he continues to live and work with his wife Rosa Loy. In 1981, Rauch enrolled as an art student at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Following his studies, he worked as University assistant from 1993 to 1998. Rauch is a key figure of the New Leipzig School, a group of realistic painters associated with Arno Rink and Sighard Gille. In 2005, Rauch became Chair of the Painting at the University of Leipzig, succeeding his former professor Arno Rink. Neo Rauch’s works display a combination of realism and surrealist abstraction, unique to Rauch. He often paints human figures engaged in manual labor against backdrops of everyday architecture, industrial settings, or landscapes. Overall, his works have a dreamlike atmosphere, often due to arbitrary and non-perspectival scales. Rauch was awarded with the Vincent van Gogh Biannual Award of Contemporary Art in Europe (2002), the Kunstpreis Finkenwerder (2005) and was honoured by the Bible and Culture Foundation (2010). He is internationally represented by galleries Eigen+Art and David Zwirner. His works are part of several collections, i.e. the MoMA, the Guggenheim New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Recently his work has been presented at the MO.CO Hotel des collections in France (2023), the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany (2024) and the Mudam in Luxembourg (2024).