Neo Rauch is one of Germany's most successful contemporary painters. Now he’s just opened a sensational solo exhibition in Leipzig where he lives and works. Since 2005 Rauch has also been teaching as professor at Leipzig’s famous art academy. For the new exhibition Neo Rauch produced twelve large-format oil paintings devoted to the theme of time. At the opening in September thousands of visitors came to the gallery EIGEN + ART and many of them were from overseas. "I have already had offers for all twelve pictures, from private collectors as well as from museums." announced gallery owner Judy Lybke at the opening party while the first guests were milling around wide-eyed, trying to decipher the enormous dreamscapes. Collectors and museums pay up to a quarter of a million Euros for a work by Rauch.

Rainer Traube, head of DW-TV arts and culture was able to meet this media-shy artist in Leipzig to talk about his mysteriously anachronistic work.

DW-TV: Is Neo Rauch a storyteller?

Neo Rauch: Yes, of course. I do see myself as a storyteller. My pictures are obviously structured narratives, and for me they are very clear. For me, everything is very clear when I stand in front of my paintings. Sometimes I even ask myself if they aren't a bit TOO clear. Perhaps I should retreat back into my shell? But then I’m brought back to reality when I’m confronted with reactions like yours. Obviously my work isn’t as easy to read as I think. But I still believe that it can be interpreted to a certain extent, but always with a remainder that cannot be named or explained, which is essential for a work of art.

So you do want to be deciphered?

Yes, but I don’t want to churn out an extension of newscasts with other means. I don't want to do journalism nor do I want to be the uncle telling fairy tales.

You once described the act of painting as "standing in front of a canvas as if it were a fogbank". What happens then?

Yes, it really can feel like that. You are an instrument of something different. As if something works through me. In my own way, I take in the world through myself. It all comes out at the tip of my brush, and reappears in a transformed manner. But this isn’t an everyday experience. Perhaps it’s best described as a kind of chess game you against yourself. The starting-point is very clear. Before I can begin I have to look at the various positions; I have to work out what the basic constellation is. And as soon as that's clear, I can begin. From that point on I'm really just a painter. I am only acting as a sleepwalking director in my own private theatre. It’s almost as being under the influence of drugs.

Your pictures are mainly peopled with male figures

Oh, I have been trying my best to correct that balance, but I am still more at home with my own sex. I have the benefit of first-hand experience of the fears, fallacies, worries and anguish that men go through. So essentially these are all self-portraits. Women appear more as a counterpoint, as healers, wise women, goddesses and angels.

Americans in particular find your pictures very German

I’ve had American gallery owners coming up to me and ask: "What gives with you over there, why are you all trying so hard to be American? We’ve got enough of that here!" This scrambling to keep up, to appear cosmopolitan, has the downside that it leads to a lot of commonplace art. I haven’t made a conscious decision to go against this; all I’ve done is to continue doing my own thing. Suddenly I found that I was being perceived in a different way, as someone set apart from those who are just trying to keep in touch.

"Pop-Art with an East-German accent" is how one American critic described it.

People only say that because they know I was born in the East. If the pictures had been painted in Belgium or London, no one would ever think of giving them this label. It’s what people like to say who believe that I am still bound up in what I have experienced in those tortured times. All I can say is that they are wrong.

But you are regarded as the founder of the New Leipzig School and as its most successful representative...

That really touches a sore point, because I have found that the very young painters, my students, are really suffering under this category. And those in-between have also got sick and tired of this pigeon-holing. I personally have always thought it rather silly. Of course it’s great to have a buzzword, an easy way to package a phenomenon. But the only thing that connects all our various positions is our commitment to painting.

Are you interested in the boom in the art market, all this talk about stars, prices and art fairs?

I try to keep all this as far away as possible from my own life. It’s so obvious that this is an overheated machine running out of control. The bursting of the bubble that friends and enemies are both anticipating and fearing might take a while. We have quite successfully tried to keep a lid on prices, to not let them soar to the regions that some of my colleagues have been pushed to. My output is manageable: I can only paint around 20 pictures a year. But is getting difficult for the up-and-coming artists. If you haven’t even graduated and are already being sold for breath taking sums in New York galleries. People actually believe that these raw works can be used as cash cows. Some of them are in for a big disappointment when things start to go downhill.

You don’t like talking about the prices of your pictures?

The criticism is always focussed on the painters, which is rather strange Where do I stand with my prices? Now I'll talk about it, although it really belongs on the financial pages. The topic disgusts me. But look at Damien Hirst or Andreas Gursky and so forth. In their case no one has a problem with it, it’s accepted as a fact, even applauded. But with painters, you are questioned critically: How has it come to this? What do you think about it? Can you deal with it?

Does painting have any power left in this world that is inundated with images?

Of course really depends of its substance. Painting has the power to hit the general chaos of information overkill and opulence of misery like a meteorite. It can also work its way subversively swimming with the stream while creating spaces from the inside where intellect finds room to breathe. This is what drives you to keep on going back to the canvas. This yearning for paintings that no one else is providing - so I have to do it myself. This is my understanding of art. It is without intention, like a natural phenomenon that cannot possibly brooded out in dry cerebral recesses. Very anachronistic...