Ralph Keuning

The definitive monograph on the acclaimed German artist Neo Rauch, one of the most influential figurative painters working today Neo Rauch is one of the world’s most successful and popular contemporary artists. A leading force of the Leipzig School, the group of artists that emerged from East Germany in the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rauch quickly established himself internationally through his large canvases featuring a crossover between Surrealism and popular imagery. Characterized by a bright acidic palette, Rauch’s ambiguous landscapes are populated by spatially connected, alienated figures conjuring a mysterious atmosphere of distorted nostalgia and failed Utopia. This career-spanning monograph was made in close collaboration with the artist, showcasing Rauch’s work alongside essays and texts that illuminate his work and career.

Facing Fear is the first time the sculptures of Lynn Chadwick and Alberto Giacometti have ever been explicitly compared and contrasted. In 1956, Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale. The youngest artist ever to receive the prize, this British sculptor had begun his career only six years earlier. The runners-up included Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), who was then already a renowned artist and the overwhelming favourite to win. Yet the question of which one received the prize - Giacometti won shortly afterwards, in 1962 - is less significant than the fact that both of them were nominated for it. Each of the two represented, in his own way, the confusion and disillusionment that prevailed in Cold War Europe. For Giacometti, these tensions set off a deep existential crisis that led to a radical shift in his work. His string-like forms, now well known, literally pare down the human being to his essence. In that same period, Chadwick's constructivist figures were described as 'the geometry of fear', a desperate cry expressing the sense of menace that had the artist and his contemporaries in a stranglehold. Text in English and Dutch.