Neo Rauch

Painting`s main attribute is the ability to create an autonomous space, exploring a mixture of reality and the subjective inner world of the artist. My main interest are paintings that directly draw upon this ambiguity. Surreal and elusive images depicting both reality and the world of dreams cause fluid stages of uncertainty between recognition and discovery of the new and yet unseen. What are the pictorial and formal elements of such images? How and why does an artist create pictures with enigmatic and unresolvable messages, inviting an experience,
not to understand?

The author proposes post-imperial analysis as a new research agenda for the study of (post-)GDR literature and painting. The article models this kind of analysis with respect to works by the authors listed in the title, focusing on the representation/destruction of the Soviet tank as an object embodying imperial sovereignty. More specifically, the author explores a series of scopic scenarios that dramatize the confrontation with Soviet tanks, drawing on Carl Schmitt's 1950s concept of iconographic space for its political theory and tracing the genealogy of this iconographic object, its constitution as aesthetic object, in the work of Soviet artists. Reading the (textual and visual) demolition of the tank as post-imperial gesture, the article studies strategies that either destroy aesthetic conventions or explode the object through a process of de-scription.

Atendiendo la frontera que separa la ficción de la realidad, la pintura de Neo Rauch, a través del género de lo fantástico, representa elementos insólitos que irrumpen en la estabilidad del espectador para cuestionarlo. Así, desde una ideología postsocialista proveniente del realismo socialista que estudia durante su formación, su obra asimila distintas fuentes iconográficas, conformando un espacio de convergencia unificadora que hará reflexionar sobre la persistencia del trasfondo ideológico, aún presente en la actualidad. Ello establece un imaginario que, a la vez de crear nuevos mitos modernos, deja de lado la instauración del «hombre nuevo» —objetivo propagandístico del realismo socialista— para acceder a lo «fantástico trascendental», este «sueño» de un arte que invita a la reflexión, dando lugar, de este modo, a un verdadero ser humano renovado que encuentra su identidad al afrontar su momento, poshistórico y anacrónico, sin el lastre de traumas causados por acontecimientos del pasado.