Many critics think Neo Rauch is too slick for his own good — a hunky, brooding German painter with an abiding art-world buzz and a name that could be mistaken for a modernist movement. But the chatter falls away in front of the work itself: the core of the New Leipzig School, Rauch plays on socialist realism with markedly surreal shifts in time and subject matter. His continuous-narrative paintings merge figures with architectural elements, and change the time of day in the length of a soldier's stride — it's as though the artist is continually turning his head while choosing what to paint, and where.