Everything is possible in Norbert Bisky’s pictures. People and things learn to fly, fixed boundaries are overridden, the audience’s curiosity is served to the point of overexcitement. With his colourful catastrophes, merging bodies and drunken gods, the German painter became one of the most important contemporary artists and a celebrated representative of Postmodernism and New Realism.
(...) Continue readingNorbert Bisky – Childhood in the GDR; student of Georg Baselitz
Norbert Bisky was born on 10 October 1970 in Leipzig. His father was the former chairman of the Left Party, Lothar Bisky, his elder brother the writer Jens Bisky, whilst his younger brother Stephan Bisky died at the age of 25. Norbert Bisky spent his childhood in the GDR and initially studied first art history and German at the Berlin Humboldt University from 1990. He later chose art, and was a pupil of Georg Baselitz at the University of Arts. A very formative, one-year study period in Madrid brought him into contact with the works of Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera and Francisco de Goya. In Salzburg, he attended Jim Dine’s summer course, and back in Berlin was a master student of his teacher, Baselitz.
First pictures ‘washed with Lenor’; idealisation of Socialism
Norbert Bisky began his career with strikingly bright, light oil paintings, which the artist jokingly described as ‘washed with Lenor’. His preferred motifs at this time were almost entirely gutsy, often blond, curly haired young men, their perfectly formed bodies in athletic poses, or pure, untouched nature. Some critics felt uncomfortably reminded of the aesthetic of the National Socialist propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, an accusation that the artist emphatically rejected with reference to his personal biography as a leftist and homosexual. Nevertheless, Norbert Bisky’s early work could not deny its origins and conjured up an idealised socialist world for the viewer.
Later pictures show drastic depictions of social criticism
In his later pictures, Norbert Bisky radically changed his tone and did not shy away from the deliberate dismantling of his one-time icons. The Grande Guignol style of his pictures presented themselves content-wise as anything but bright and friendly: children were eaten, limbs torn off, blood spurted, there were streams of urine and vomit. The artist has held this line to this day: in his more recent paintings, Norbert Bisky is interested in an unblemished world only to the extent that he shows the onset of violence and destruction. In doing so, the artist combines his drastic depictions with deliberate criticism of the social developments of our time: body cult, terrorism, rampant violence and anti-Semitism.
Durability of the fine arts as trump card
Norbert Bisky has received prizes and awards for his work; to the barely concealed delight of the media, it was the FDP politician Guido Westerwelle, of all people, who acquired several pictured by Lothar Bisky’s son for his private collection. Bisky himself deals calmly with these peaks; he sees himself engaged in a constant battle of pictures, in which he sees precisely the great durability of his oil paintings as a great trump card against the flood of low-value newspaper prints and digital image files on the internet. Less enduring but much noted was his set for the Berlin State Ballet’s staging of ‘Masse’ in 2013. In 2015 Bisky embarked on a special artistic experiment and swapped his studio for three months with the Tel Aviv-based artist Erez Israeli.
Norbert Bisky lives and works today primarily in Berlin.
Norbert Bisky - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
