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

While Ruckhaberle pays special attention to the rooms where all this pent-up nonconnecting is going on, Matthias Weischer's province is empty rooms altogether, sans any overt human presence, although the decor and look of the rooms evoke the life that has transpired within them--how history has there left its imprint and memory its traces. Yet the possibility has been left open that these are not "real" rooms at all but instead hallucinations or fantasies. In his hands, innocuous wallpaper, upholstery, lampshades, rugs and walls cross over into painterly abstraction, or rather exist on the cusp of abstraction. Weischer's luscious, subdued colors saturate the canvas. On close inspection, one might detect a network of horizontal or vertical brushstrokes, or an underlying grid, as the artist appears to have scraped off paint, and otherwise gouged or marred the surface. Weischer calls attention to the objecthood of his paintings, to their status as contrived things.

In K O (2003), a moderate-size work at 29 1/2 by 33 1/2 inches, one sees a bedroom in an otherwise vacant and perhaps abandoned apartment. In the room there is a bare mattress on the floor and atop the mattress a child's block with the letters "K" and "O" (as in knock out), a pair of fancy slippers on the dark rug in the middle of the room, and what looks like a tiara nearby, also on the floor. The whole spare ensemble is surprisingly lush in the treatment of aging (yet still vivid) patterned wallpaper, a beige upper wall and ceiling, a brown circular rug and a beaded curtain in the doorway. This is a searingly lonely and unnerving work, in which the walls and the few objects in the room seem imbued with mute, indecipherable stories and an unshakable melancholy. Typically, Weischer's rooms, many lacking windows and some lacking doors, seem cut off from the world, and also unstuck in time: they could be from last week, or from Leipzig in the 1980s, or from somewhere in Germany in the 1930s. They also double as psychological zones, conjuring complicated states of mind.

Martin Kobe, the only artist here whose primary medium is acrylic, also paints empty rooms, but from a very different perspective. Kobe is interested in the futuristic strain of modernist architecture (of which Berlin's Alexanderplatz is a prime example) that at one point heralded a coming socialist ideal and now seems dated, a utopian dream soluble in time. Science-fiction scenarios of a distant future, architectural models and pure fantasy also figure in these paintings, which seem vaguely plausible but also nutty and outlandish. With the vibrant reds, sky blues and light greens of an untitled work from 2003, an architectural study becomes a vertigo-inducing force in which basic directions (such as up and down, inside and outside) get scrambled, to the point where the whole tense structure seems poised to break into smithereens. Kobe is the one artist in these shows obviously influenced by computer-era esthetics. Here, his painted building has a distinctly cyber look. Part of the ceiling appears to be on the floor, windows double as walls, bizarre angles abound, and the whole space feels like some strange transformational chamber: enter here and you might experience wonder, but you might also lose your bearings forever.