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. To celebrate the occasion, we are very pleased to be able to offer an unusual Collector’s Edition, featuring an original work by the artist. The lithograph, in red on white rag paper, is a modern version of the old myth of Samson and Delilah. When the woman’s hand cuts his hair, the man pays for it by the loss of his strength; the masculine nature cannot tolerate any domesticating interference. Rauch picks apart the original story with irony and his usual intelligence: by shifting the setting to the living room, the story takes on humorous, middle-class overtones, allowing us to doubt that the man possessed his purported power of violence in the first place.
