Neo Rauch at David Zwirner - New York

As a native of what was once East Germany, painter Neo Rauch cut his teeth as an artist on the official figurative style of the Soviet bloc. He remains an aficionado of figuration, but in his work, Social Realism has undergone a strange mutation. His large tableaux, painted with a palette that favors drabbed down hues of brown, green and rust, suggest an East German version of the "Twilight Zone" in which Rod Serling's beleaguered shop girls, secretaries and low-level corporate hacks have been replaced with proletarian heroes. The types represented in this show include the schoolteacher, the butcher, the scientist, the gardener and the hiker. They are posed in settings that mix bland Soviet-bloc architecture with weirdly biomorphic structures that seem futuristic in a mid-20th-century way.

In a painting titled Hatz, three men in green trench coats and feathered caps slide about an ice-covered pond wielding hockey sticks, apparently unconcerned that the fourth of their number has been swallowed by an ice block. Adding to the confusion, another ice cube is disgorging a large green creature whose surface sheen and bulbous form bring to mind a giant gummi worm. In Quiz, a group of what appear to be game-show contestants sit behind a desk in a sleek modernist room. Visible through a large window in the room is a row of quaint Bavarian-style houses. At their feet, in a pose which suggests exhaustion or perhaps remorse, is a man with a hammer surrounded by strange cartoon figures that he has apparently been dismantling.

Despite such peculiar situations, Rauch's personages go impassively about their business, and their air of studied normalcy gives the works an understated comic effect. Adding to the absurdity is the deliberately awkward handling of figures, colors and even paint application. In the end, Rauch's disjunctive narratives suggest a world whose comforting order has been shaken apart by unseen and unfathomable forces and subjected to a new logic whose outlines remain obscure. In this, they offer an apt response to the post-Cold War world.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group