Structural Patterns

Walking around Chelsea yesterday, I stepped into David Zwirner that had a show titled 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) and was excited to discover Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fresh-Air Cart” from 1974 (pictured below).

This past week, I made my regular stop through Zwirner and was happy to encounter new work by Neo Rauch, one of my favorite contemporary painters. Rather than trying to describe the individual paintings documented here, I’ll list the general reasons that I’m drawing to Rauch’s work:

1. The heroic scale places the viewer into the painted environment, allowing one to enjoy the rich mixture of painting styles – moments of abastracion embedded within the general social realist setting.

2. The striking power of social realism interwoven with neoclassical depiction to create a displaced narrative. Displaced because various historical elements of varying Western periods are juxtopsed to allude to bourgeois revolutions, industrialization, socialism, the ideals of free time and creative engagement, fascism…

the rise of science, a depiction of German culture and human nature in general… The narratives are rich not only for their masterful use of paint, but because they trigger various learned histories with irrational creative nuances that bring to mind fatastic fables.

3. Technically – masterful use of paint and color, rich mixture of technical styles.

4. Lastly, I’ll repeat this point, employment of the fantastic that brings to mind old fables.

Neo Rauch at David Zwirner, May 12th through June 21st 2008