Neo Rauch - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Tuesday, October 13, 2015 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig

  • Exhibited

    Leipzig, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Neo Rauch: Zeitraum, 9 September-22 December 2006

  • Literature

    Neo Rauch: Der Zeitraum, exh. cat., Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig, 2006, unpaginated (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    ‘All the world’s a stage’ when it comes to the work of Neo Rauch. Rauch encapsulates the daily endurances of people operating in a climate of social uncertainty and political change with his individual quest for resolve since infancy. His lack of scale and intentional use of fadedness contributes to the idea that his paintings operate beyond what is merely seen, but what is felt and thought. Industry, military, destitution, and the banal are all morphed into aesthetic commentaries through Rauch’s imagination.

    Rauch’s painting Die Lage follows in his tradition that clothing is representational of social status, which in the present lot consists of armour, middle-class and labour attire, even a female skirt is seen at closer glance as one of the three layers of dress from the waist down on one of the figures, in addition to a man without any clothes at all in the background. This painting signifies the evolution of the artist’s body of work. There are clear distinctions within the artist’s portfolio as his style develops, many of which are apparent in the present lot, especially Rauch’s use of colour and his exaggeration of dreamlike elements. Monochrome colour combinations are substituted for bright and contrasting blasts of paint, giving the works more presence in the ‘now’ oppose to the effect of dated artefacts, acting as anachronisms when presented in modern galleries. This painting contains both the artist’s mood and sensations at the time of production, but perhaps more sentimentally, the journey Neo Rauch has undergone both stylistically and emotionally over the course of his on-going, successful career.

    Die Lage is a contemporary painting on canvas with signs of past, present and future. It is the dedication to self through the striking regurgitation of how Rauch perceives the destruction of one paradigm and rise of another that cements his status as a staple in the world of contemporary art.

Ο30

Die Lage

2006
oil on canvas
305 x 425 x 6 cm (120 1/8 x 167 3/8 x 2 3/8 in.)
Signed and dated 'Rauch 06' lower right

Estimate
£600,000 - 800,000 ‡♠

Sold for £866,500

Contact Specialist
Peter Sumner
Head of Contemporary Art, London
psumner@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4063

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

London 14 October 2015 7pm