Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection

by Mark Coetzee, Laura Steward Heon, Tilo Baumgartel (Artist)

In December 2000, a group of five young German artists, all recent graduates of the prestigious Leipzig Art Academy, organized a small exhibition of their works in Leipzig. Unsurprisingly, the exhibition attracted no notice from the international contemporary art community. From that humble beginning, the "New Leipzig School" has expanded to a dozen artists and grown to be an international phenomenon. On March 19, 2005, MASS MoCA presented the country’s foremost collection of paintings from the New Leipzig School--a collection built by the Rubell Family in Miami--for the first time, and what followed was an international avalanche of attention and demand. That exhibition, Life After Death , and this corresponding publication, include 62 key works by the most sought-after painters of the moment, including Tilo Baumgartel, Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, Neo Rauch, Christoph Rückhaberle, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer.
Santa Site Santa Fe, 4/21/06-6/19/06
Washington Katzen Arts Center Museum, 9/5/06-10/29/06
Frye Art Museum, 2/16/07-6/3/07
Salt Lake Salt Lake Art Center, 6/23/07-9/30/07
Kansas Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 11/6/07-2/3/08

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2006

About the author

Mark Coetzee was a South African curator, author, and artist whose career spanned continents and institutions. After studying Fine Art at Stellenbosch University, he began his career as a painter and later founded the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet in Cape Town in the late 1990s. In 2001, he was appointed director of the Rubell Family Collection (now the Rubell Museum) in Miami, where he helped shape one of the most influential private collections of contemporary art.
In 2009, Coetzee joined Puma as program director of PumaVision and chief curator of Puma.Creative, working under Jochen Zeitz. This collaboration led to his appointment as founding executive director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA), which opened in Cape Town in 2017 as a major platform for contemporary African art. He resigned from Zeitz MOCAA in 2018 amid allegations of misconduct.
Throughout his life, Coetzee remained active as a writer and art critic, contributing to publications including The Huffington Post, Mail & Guardian, Revue Noire, and Sunday Independent, and publishing monographs on various artists. He was remembered for his belief in the transformative power of art and his influence on the African and international art scenes.

Reviews

[William West]

This exhibit at Mass MOCA introduced me to the new school of allegorical painting coming out of the former East Germany.