In Tal, the sky and the ground are the same monochromatic beige, yielding a formal conflation of up and down, heaven and earth there is something vertiginous and precarious about the scene. They might be triggered by details in and around Leipzig, or by childhood memories and, as he has occasionally indicated, dreams, but their reach is into a collective past and toward a speculative future.
In fact, Rauch’s paintings are curiously mobile in time. It could be any time in Germany: the late 1990s in some outlying district, the 1960s in the workers’ and peasants’ DDR, the 1920s before the rise of Nazism.
A broken ladder lies on the ground a rural road angles into the distance, presumably toward farmlands. The painting is set in a small German village: just a couple of houses, a windmill, a white fence and some trees. Adopting and transforming distinctively East German elements, including propaganda posters, book illustrations, heroic monuments and the resolutely unflashy colors of East German consumer products and design, they also embodied a deeply compelling vision, broadly social yet intensely, inscrutably personal.Ī photograph of Rauch’s painting Tal (Valley), 1999, accompanied Smith’s article. The paintings were at once scruffy and elegant, cartoonish and old masterish, forthright and enigmatic. Reviewing the Armory Show in the New York Times, Roberta Smith singled out Rauch for his “intriguing paintings” and “beautiful paint handling.” It’s worth recalling how striking and idiosyncratic the work seemed at the time.