Artist Neo Rauch, one of Germany’s richest men, on his unsettling art and fall of the Berlin Wall

Neo Rauch is a German painter whose name literally means “new smoke”. Presumably when their son was born on April 18, 1960, his parents, both art students in what was then East Germany, wanted to celebrate a fresh start to family life. He can never be certain, however, because four weeks later they were both killed in a Leipzig train crash in which 52 other people also died.

Even if you knew nothing about his background, it is impossible to look at a Rauch painting without a sense of foreboding. He populates his work with grotesque beasts and old-fashioned characters engaged in the kind of quaint tasks – chopping, hewing, juggling – that feature in fairy tales. Somewhere in these disturbingly colourful visions there is often a figure who is oblivious to the danger that is about to strike.

Rauch’s subject matter means that he is usually described as a “surrealist” but his art feels too internalised to be truly surreal. Magritte could stand back, appraisingly, and make a pipe and a urinal witty; for Rauch, it’s up close and personal. The 2016 documentary Comrades and Companions begins with a lengthy sequence in which Rauch manhandles a huge canvas into his Leipzig studio. After a while, he gasps, “Where are the 30 assistants?” – a droll dig at some of his contemporaries like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Onto such canvases he says he has “beaten a trail through my internal woodlands”. Only one person can advise him along those paths and that’s Rosa Loy: “My neighbour, my colleague, my wife,” he says during a recent interview at Hong Kong’s David Zwirner gallery. He might have added “gatekeeper” to the description because, at the last minute, Loy – to whom he has been married for 30 years and who paints in a studio adjoining his – refuses to allow him to be photographed for this article.

Still, he is permitted to talk, which he does with honest deliberation in both German and English. He is not one of life’s glib chatterers. In the documentary, there are several scenes (one of them at a David Zwirner opening in New York) where the viewer is irresistibly reminded of Clint Eastwood glancing sideways to find the quickest route out of town. What matters to Rauch is the work. Every day he cycles to his Leipzig studio in a former spinning mill and creates artistic gold. It has made him one of Germany’s wealthiest men – but there is also a sense of spellbound compulsion.