Neo Rauch (*1960) graduated from the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Visual Arts) as master student of Bernhard Heisig in 1990. In 1997 he won the art prize of the Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper which lead to a first institutional exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig. The breakthrough year was 2000 with a touring exhibition at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and at the Kunsthalle Zürich. Since then he has shown at a variety of venues including the Venice Biennale, a solo show at the Vienna Albertina, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York; in 2010 a major double retrospective simultaneously opened in Leipzig and Munich. Rauch lives and works in Leipzig.

Gary Tinterow is the newly named director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. During his 27-year tenure at the Metropolitan Museum in New York he organized dozens of exhibitions on European painters of the last two centuries, from Ingres and Gericault to Picasso and Matisse. In 2007 he organized Neo Rauch: Para.

Harald Kunde is director of the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, having previously been director of the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen and the Kunsthaus Dresden. He has worked on numerous exhibitions and publications with contemporary artists, including Atelier van Lieshout, Sophie Calle, Chuck Close, Franz Gertsch, Barbara Kruger, Dan Perjovschi, Neo Rauch, Roman Signer, and Erwin Wurm.

Wolfgang Büscher has written several books, among them the bestsellers Berlin–Moskau: Eine Reise zu Fuß (2003), Asian Absences (2008), and Hartland (2011).

Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include the Collector’s Editions Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Neo Rauch, Ai Weiwei, Beatriz Milhazes, Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, Glenn Brown, the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs such as the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat.