“Neo Rauch: Aus dem Boden/From the Floor”

Born in the former East Germany, Neo Rauch was a leader of the Leipzig School, which spawned what was arguably the first generation of German artists to grapple with the fallout from Germany’s re-unification after the Cold War. The country’s troubled past figures heavily in Rauch’s phantasmagoric paintings, which mix Surrealism, Expressionism, Pop Art and the Social Realism of his youth. Organically grown out of what Rauch has described as a form of studio-born reverie, these compositions evoke a kind of daydream nation as police state, where painterly allusions are as omnipresent and impenetrable as the Stasi. This show is the first in NYC to concentrate on Rauch’s equally provocative works on paper.