Neo Rauch has all but cornered the market on post-modern historical painting. While his histories don’t overtly present as such, he does thread a specific temporal narrative (German, idealist) through what one might describe as the hangover dream of the repressed nation-state. The nation-state haunting here is the former East Germany, a state cornered by its political designation, one aligned to Cold War socialism and the social realism that became the sanctioned genre of that limited corner. Rauch doesn’t go about incorporating his experience like some of his older forebears, Gerhard Richter or Sigmar Polke; they, like him, grew up in the East and plotted their aesthetic self-creation from a point of departure left over from official culture. Rather, his approach represents a return to a kind of figuration that Richter and Polke most probably eschewed as being too close to the official social realist style. Rauch seems unafraid to go there simply because historical distance may have made it palatable again for his own generation, for whom the style most likely became, ironically, more of a pop idiom.
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