Once upon a time in east Germany, two beautiful young art students had a baby boy. A month later they were killed in a train crash. The orphan was raised by his grandparents in a mountain village, and spent his days drawing and painting. As early as he could, he set off to the city to become an artist. Initially "a pariah, humiliated, ridiculed by curators and ignored by collectors", he began to enjoy success as east Germany grew more prosperous and outward-looking, and his career went global when he was hailed in New York as "the painter who came in from the cold". His first exhibition in London opened this week.
That is the life story of Neo Rauch, most dazzling of the Leipzig school of figurative artists who emerged in the decade after the Berlin Wall came down. Even his name, with its implications of a new fire in art—"Rauch" means smoke in German—has mythic overtones, and his large-scale, busy paintings, with arbitrary shifts in scale and skewed perspectives, look like illustrations to fairy tales.
Read more at The Financial Times.