Neo Rauch's (b. 1960) paintings are characterized by their distinctive combination of figurative imagery and surrealist abstraction. His enigmatic compositions employ an eccentric iconography of human characters, animals, and hybrid forms within familiar-looking but imaginary settings. While Rauch begins each work without a preconceived idea of the finished result, there is a uniquely recognizable, visual coherence to his oeuvre. Paintings often display palettes of strong, complementary colors, and recurrent subjects include the seamless integration of organic and non-organic elements as well as references to the creative process, music, and manual labor. The artist's treatment of scale is deliberately arbitrary and non-perspectival, and often seems to allude to different time zones or planes of existence.
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Berlin and New York. He is a novelist, essayist, and playwright, and his works have won the Candide Prize, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Prize, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. His novel Measuring the World (2007) has been translated into forty languages.
