Museum de Fundatie has bought a seminal work from the early oeuvre of Neo Rauch (Leipzig 1960). The painting Tal dates from 1999, the year Neo Rauch had his international breakthrough. The purchase was realised with financial support from the BankGiro Lottery, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its Titus Fund and its theme fund Postwar and Contemporary Art) and the Mondriaan Fund.
Neo Rauch participated in the famous 'Armory Show' in New York in February 1999 and was noticed by Roberta Smith, reviewer of the New York Times. She praised Neo Rauch in that newspaper for his intriguing paintings and beautiful manner of painting. His work was considered distinctive in the United States. That was particularly true of Rauch's figurative imagery that was founded on GDR design as well as cartoons and pop art. His participation in the fair in New York marked the pivotal moment of Rauch's career; until then he had been known mainly in Germany and now American museums and collectors were catching sight of him. Via the United States, he also broke through to Europe, where he received the Vincent Award in 2002, followed by a series of important solo exhibitions.
The New York Times article featured a work by Neo Rauch on display at the Armory Show. This 1999 painting is also titled Tal, but is smaller than the painting with the same title from the same year, which Museum de Fundatie has now acquired. Rauch created this work after its presentation in New York. The setting of the painting is the same, but the size is larger, the figures more elaborate (they feature American-looking boxer's trousers and trainers) and on the trough in the foreground, TAL has been added in letters, possibly inspired by the containers of mega-corporation TAL International that Rauch saw in the container ports of New York, near the site of the Armory Show. The colours are largely monochrome, a reference to comic strips and possibly American colour field painting. The iconography of Tal shows references to Neo Rauch's terse biography. He lost his parents, two art students aged 19 and 21, in a train accident when he was four weeks old. The stairs as rails and the blades and sticks as andreas crosses refer to this. Rauch grew up with his grandparents in Aschersleben, the former GDR, recognisable in the landscape and architecture.
In 2016, the Fundatie acquired Gewitterfront from that year, with financial support from the BankGiro Lottery, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its Titus Fund), the Mondriaan Fund and VSB Fund. A painting that quickly became iconic in the Netherlands and was the starting point for the exhibition Neo Rauch Dromos Paintings 1993-2017, with which the Fundatie attracted 88,000 visitors to Zwolle. Following the exhibition, three paintings were loaned to the museum (Neujahr by Broere Charitable Foundation collection, Der Lehrling byArthouse and Tal) and the museum received two graphic works (Zeiger and Schilfer). With the earlier acquisition of Gewitterfront in 2016, the Fundatie now offers a broad and in-depth look at Rauch's work over the period from Tal from 1999 to Neujahr from 2005 and on to Gewitterfront from 2016 and the graphic works Schilfer and Zeiger from 2017. This gives the museum a unique ensemble by Neo Rauch, not only for the Netherlands, but also internationally.
By acquiring Tal, Museum de Fundatie joins the line of important modern art museums that have works by Neo Rauch in their collections, including Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Denver Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Museum de Fundatie has acquired Tal for €650,000 and thanks to support from the BankGiro Lottery, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its Titus Fund and its theme fund Postwar and Contemporary Art) and the Mondriaan Fund. "Museum de Fundatie thus has a fantastic and internationally unique permanent presentation of one of today's most important painters within its walls and we are extremely grateful to the participants of the BankGiro Lottery, the Rembrandt Association and its Titus Fund and the Mondriaan Fund for this enrichment of the museum's collection and thus of the Netherlands' collection," said Ralph Keuning, director of Museum de Fundatie.
Neo Rauch
Neo Rauch (Leipzig 1960) is a leading artist. He is of the generation of artists who grew up in the working-class paradise of the GDR, but who are young enough not to be associated with its oppressive ideology. On behalf of Germany, he participated in the Venice Biennale in 2001 and the São Paulo Biennale in 2004. From 2005 to 2009, he was a professor of painting at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. Since 2009, he has held an honorary doctorate there. An exponent of the so-called Neue Leipziger Schule, Rauch works in a highly individual surrealist style, virtuosically integrating tradition and modernity. He mirrors the world to us as in a theatre, a 'theatrum mundi', with self-created sets and figures playing a role in a story that inextricably links history and current events. With his collage-like compositions, he personally comments on the complexity of life in 20th- and 21st-century society.
