Among the ranks of today’s contemporary painters in Germany, Neo Rauch has attained a unique position: his oeuvre has achieved wide recognition around the world, and the most important museums and collectors endeavor to acquire his paintings. To celebrate Rauch’s fiftieth birthday, an extensive retrospective will be shown in Leipzig and Munich simultaneously, each one featuring works dating from 1982 to early 2010.The accompanying monograph is also unique. In it, long-time colleagues and companions provide highly individual descriptions of their experiences with Rauch’s paintings. They include fellow artists Luc Tuymans, Jonathan Meese, and Michaël Borremans. Art critics and historians such as Rudij Bergmann and Werner Hofmann, and museum directors, such as Markus Brüderlin and many others, interpret selected works of their choice in brief essays. An erudite text by Bernhart Schwenk provides an art-historical perspective on the artist’s entire body of work, while Uwe Tellkamp’s exclusive essay and a series of photos of Neo Rauch's studio by Timm Rautert complete this comprehensive publication. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-2520-0) Exhibition schedule: Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig: April 18–August 15, 2010 ¦ Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, April 20–August 15, 2010When NEO RAUCH was a student of Arno Rink’s at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany was still a divided country. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, his large, cryptic paintings conquered the art world by storm and Rauch became a trailblazer for the New Leipzig School, as well as its most famous representative. His paintings added elements of Pop Art, comics, and advertising graphics to figural painting.