The canvas is his backdrop. Titus Schade (*1984 in Leipzig), former master student of Neo Rauch, paints complex and enraptured pictorial worlds that seem as controlled as they are unique. Half-timbered buildings, windmills, churches, and crude buildings from the nineteen-sixties seem strangely flattened and cut out, as if lacking volume. They inhabit a space where conventional perspectives have become lost. The painted buildings—whether lined up in a shelving unit or against the darkness of an inky black surface—form a kind of magical locality that can be entered with the eyes, though hardly described in words. This monograph brings together an extensive selection of these unique works, created in the period between 2009 and 2016. It invites us to encounter Schade’s backdrop-like paintings and to wander through their spaces of illusion.When NEO RAUCH was a student of Arno Rink’s at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany was still a divided country. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, his large, cryptic paintings conquered the art world by storm and Rauch became a trailblazer for the New Leipzig School, as well as its most famous representative. His paintings added elements of Pop Art, comics, and advertising graphics to figural painting.