Figuring the new Germany: close on the heels of Leipzig native Neo Rauch, younger artists from the eastern German city are garnering critical attention. Two private collections on view in the U.S. spotlight this school representational painting

Hot young artists, a world-class influence and inspiration (Rauch), big-deal collectors, a savvy gallery, rising prices, concurrent museum shows and lofty claims about the group's importance all smack of considerable hype, and fit with the current tendency to exalt youthful artists, including those just a couple of years out of graduate school. The welcome surprise, however, is that both shows actually looked wonderful and refreshing, and suggested that the New Leipzig painters in their several ways are convincing and meaningful innovators.

While grounded in representation, all these artists incorporate unusual, space-altering perspectives, surprising shifts in scale and unorthodox sight lines; moreover, the works sometimes include highly fanciful, reality-bending imagery. The artists tend to focus on mundane (to the point of willfully banal) situations. Pensive individuals are glimpsed in profile or from behind while walking somewhere, or a few people are clustered together, as if desiring communion but weighed down by apparent uncertainty, confusion and alienation. Architecture figures prominently, especially in rooms that are worn, yet spacious and inviting. Leipzig happens to be rife with such interiors, marked by history and entropy, in part because so many buildings were neglected during socialist times. Nature scenes are never distant and spectacular in the paintings, but instead near at hand and unremarkable; they are frequently abutted by looming industrial structures or manmade objects, which constrict the otherwise expansive spaces. Almost always--and this is perhaps their most striking hallmark--quotidian circumstances are subtly charged with complex psychological nuances, including a sense of nagging loss, unease and dislocation, but also of inward voyaging and stubborn desire.

Although these artists are quite different in their approaches to the painted surface, some general remarks may be made. Colors tend to be exquisite, but in an unusual way, at once vivid and fading, as if a still-potent splendor were half-vanishing before one's eyes, introducing a vaguely mournful, even elegiac tone. Razzle-dazzle effects, willful trashiness and breezy pop-culture signifiers are all shunned. Age-old devices like single-point perspective, along with intricate and varied brushwork, complex color combinations and layering, and expressive details are all given new life. Oftentimes contemplative and subtle, these paintings are intensely communicative, probing issues of belonging and alienation in a reunified Germany.

The MASS MoCA exhibition features four large paintings by Ranch, and they underscore why he has become such a force. If it is possible to paint a subdued and thoughtful cultural cacophony, that is precisely what Rauch does, with virtuosic aplomb. In the large work Demonstrations (2004), a man in his best Leninesque, to-the-barricades pose leans out of an upper window and raises his arm, but no one is paying attention, not the people below, nor another man right behind him. Down in the streets, an officer in a bright green, Bismarckera uniform directs a haft-size man to nowhere in particular, while other people mill about holding illegible placards. It is impossible to determine what is being demonstrated for or against. You get the sense of a society riven by confusion, bewilderment, stumbling idealism and ennui. Meanwhile, a thoughtful young woman holds a big bulldog by a leash. The creature frantically gnaws a bone, while another dog, only partly visible, presumably does the same. In the foreground, a naked man squats, seemingly tied like a prisoner to two upright poles, but you don't see any ropes or chains. The whole scene is a marvel of whiplashing energies but, like so many of Ranch's works, it is also curiously static and detached, at once matter-of-fact and fantastical.