Fundatie acquires 'Gewitterfront' by Neo Rauch

Neo Rauch is counted among today's leading artists. Gewitterfront is a recent work, painted in 2016, and is part of the international portrait exhibition 'Zie de mens', on view at the Fundatie Zwolle until early next year. The acquisition was realised with financial support from the BankGiro Lottery, the Rembrandt Association (thanks in part to its Titus Fund), the Mondriaan Fund and VSBfonds.

As an exponent of the so-called Neue Leipziger Schule, Neo Rauch works in a very distinctive style, virtuosically integrating tradition and modernity. He mirrors the world to his audience as a theatre with self-created sets and figures playing a role in a story that inextricably links history and current events. With his collage-like compositions, he personally comments on the complexity of life in 20th- and 21st-century society. His work is in important international collections of modern art, including those of the Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Neo Rauch's work is also sought after by private collectors. The actor Brad Pitt bought a painting by him in 2009.

Gewitterfront is about our world, now, it shows the doubt, the kneeling, the exhaustion, the approaching danger and also the will to get up, to keep going. It is a painting about humility, penitence and perseverance. With Gewitterfront, Rauch seems to mirror his attachment to (East) Germany, his native land and source of inspiration, with his doubts about (European) identity. The canvas with the kneeling drummer in 19th-century uniform refers to both Die Blechtrommel by Günter Grass and Willy Brandt's iconic kneeling in the Warsaw ghetto in 1970, as a symbolic atonement for the Nazi persecution of Jews. In doing so, Gewitterfront provides a complex and associative picture of our history and a critical view of the future.

The great importance of Neo Rauch's painting is also widely recognised in the Netherlands. In 2002, he won the prestigious Vincent van Gogh Biennal Award for Contemporary Art in Europe. The Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht and the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague each own an early work on paper. Also in the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam are a 2005 oil on paper and in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam are a 2005 oil on canvas and a work in an artist's book. Thus, the Gewitterfront acquired by the Fundatie is the second oil painting on canvas by Neo Rauch in a public art collection in the Netherlands and the only example of his recent development.

Gewitterfront dovetails well with the international masterpieces in the collection of museum founder Dirk Hannema (1895-1984). Often loners in the Fundatie collection, these works collectively form a string of pearls spanning centuries of art history. They are given constantly changing contexts in the Fundatie's exhibition programme. In recent years, the museum has emphatically presented itself as a house for German art. 

The reason for this, apart from the presence of German artists such as Franz Marc and Max Pechstein, is the fact that the Fundatie manages the artistic legacy of Paul Citroen, owned by the Province of Overijssel. Citroen, born and raised in Berlin, was closely associated with Berlin-Dada and Bauhaus as an artist and art dealer at the beginning of the last century. Recently, the museum has produced exhibitions around the Republic of Weimar and German expressionism by Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, as well as monographic presentations of George Grosz, John Heartfield, Felix Nussbaum, Ellen Auerbach and Barbara Klemm. Exhibitions of Werner Tübke, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Fritz Klemm, Anselm Kiefer and Neo Rauch will be forthcoming.