Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy: New Prints from Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig

Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy:
New Prints from Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig

Best known as figurative painters, the artists Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy have for many years made works on paper and multiples an integral part of their respective practices. At the intimate scale of the prints presented here, the richly composed worlds of their individual oeuvres find new depths and textures through the lithographic process. At once distinct from and intimately connected to their work on canvas, these prints, produced with their longtime printer Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig, offer new ground for each artist’s narratives to play out.

Neo Rauch

Reinig, 2021

Six-color lithograph on Bütten Hahnemühle paper

30 3/4 x 23 3/8 inches (78.1 x 59.4 cm)

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“I admire those who can already see the final effect of a page they are working on—it’s easier if you are, in a sense, a good chess player. My wife and colleague Rosa is able to think several moves ahead; in that sense, she plans her lithographs in great detail. In contrast, I constantly readjust the color, and a harmonious triad often only comes about after several attempts.”

—Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch at Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig, 2020. Photo by Uwe Walter

Working with master printers at the Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig, where Rauch has produced prints since 2003, these works are made by either brushing or etching an image into stone and coating the surface in a solution that allows the ink to better penetrate it. Multiple colors are then reproduced through a careful series of “color runs.” One inked stone is required for each color in order to attain the painterly effect of watercolors or gouaches.

Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig, 2020. Photo by Uwe Walter

Signposts, arrows and directional markers pointing in myriad directions have been a prominent and recurring motif in Rauch’s most recent body of work, on view in his current exhibition, The Signpost, in New York. The title of this print, Aufwärts (meaning “upwards”) could be a reference to the yellow signpost resting on an easel, but also contrasts with the shirt worn by the artist figure in the foreground, that reads “downward” in English. Behind him is a rounded figure who seems to be in perpetual motion, wearing a hat with arrows pointing in opposite directions.

Neo Rauch

Aufwärts, 2021

Five-color lithograph on Hahnemühle Alt Worms paper

29 1/2 x 22 7/8 inches (75 x 58 cm)
Published by Utopia Editions

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Rosa Loy in her studio, Leipzig, 2020. Photo by Uwe Walter

The imagined and the real coexist in Loy’s large-scale paintings and intimate works on paper, in which female figures inhabit compositions that draw on the artist’s own experience, as well as ambiguous icons and symbols. Often borrowing imagery from fairy tales and myths, Loy transforms the familiar into the uncanny. For Loy, “In contrast with painting, the printing process is a more reduced and concise form of art making, and more graphic.”

In Bleiben oder Gehen, which translates as “stay or go,” a hybrid figure with the face of a woman and the body of a tree stands rooted in place. A second female figure, holding what appears to be a dollhouse—a recurring form in Loy’s work—steps away from her. Several more figures lay in pairs amid the hybrid figure’s roots. Playfully juxtaposed are motifs familiar to the artist’s oeuvre, such as botanical forms and a ribbon, alongside references to the myth of Apollo and Daphne and Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison series exploring female identity.

Rosa Loy

Bleiben oder Gehen, 2021

Three-color lithograph on Hahnemühle Alt Worms paper

28 3/8 x 22 1/2 inches (72 x 57 cm)
Published by Utopia Editions

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“The last two years have been so different and prompted these questions—to stay or to go—more vividly. The house or the home appears again and again in my pictures: whether as a temple, a gazebo, or a city backdrop. Within our own ‘four walls’ we feel safe and protected.… Trees are like us—different, sturdy, alive, and subject to the changing seasons.”

—Rosa Loy

Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig, 2020. Photo by Uwe Walter

Lithographisches Atelier Leipzig, 2019. Photo by Uwe Walter

“Loy is above all an inventor of seductively enigmatic imagery, one of those artists who conjure potential narratives while carefully keeping them sufficiently open-ended to allow any interested viewer to decide on his or her own.”

—Barry Schwabsky, Artforum

Neo Rauch

Kreisel, 2021

Four-color lithograph on Hahnemühle Alt Worms paper

16 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches (41.3 x 50.2 cm)

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In 2012, Rauch set up Grafikstiftung Neo Rauch, a foundation in the town of Aschersleben, Germany, where he grew up. The institution is dedicated to the entirety of his graphic work and houses one edition of each print he has produced.

The Grafikstiftung Neo Rauch, Aschersleben, Germany

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