Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Norbert Bisky is not an artificial fabrication of the contemporary art market. This painter, born in Leipzig in 1970, built a solid career first in the shadows, then in the spotlight, with works that carry the double and sometimes contradictory heritage of the East and the West. I cannot be content with what your eyes have seen on Instagram. His paintings must be looked at in reality, felt their physical presence, to grasp this constant tension between lightness and abyss.
If you have already seen a canvas by Bisky, you know. These young male bodies, often suspended in space, as if in zero gravity or in free fall. These bright or dark colors depending on the periods. This mastered painting technique. But do you really know what you are looking at? Bisky invites us on a complex journey, a dive into his personal psyche that reflects, like a distorted but faithful mirror, Germany’s tumultuous history.
The child of Leipzig grew up in a deeply communist family in the GDR. “I belong to a very communist family who truly believed in all of that,” he confided [1]. Imagine for a moment what that means: being raised in a system where socialist imagery reigns supreme, where propaganda posters are part of daily life, where official aesthetics infiltrate every corner of life. For the young Bisky, this visual matrix became both a straitjacket and fertile ground for his future creation.
The fall of the Wall in 1989 represents for him a fundamental break. While performing his military service, the world literally crumbles around him. Bisky only learns the news the next morning. “We were assembled for the morning physical exercise and the duty officer announced: ‘The Wall is open.’ We made gestures of weary disbelief: it was definitely too early for bad jokes,” he recalls [2]. This anecdote perfectly sums up the shock, disbelief and disorientation that followed this historic event. How can a young man trained in the mold of socialism suddenly navigate an unbridled capitalist world?
An encounter would prove decisive: that with the painter Georg Baselitz, whose student he became in Berlin. Under the tutelage of this master, Bisky developed his own voice, his own pictorial language. Not by imitating his mentor, but by finding his personal path. “It was a wonderful dialogue, but always with a certain distance, because I was not a fan,” he specifies [3]. This independence of mind allowed him to forge his singularity in the German artistic landscape.
Bisky’s early works clearly bear the traces of the socialist realism that cradled his childhood. But this is not a simple nostalgic appropriation. The artist operates a subtle diversion, injecting into these images of athletic bodies and idyllic landscapes a dose of homoerotic subversion and an almost supernatural light. He transforms the visual codes of his past to exorcise his own demons. “I had to paint the GDR out of my soul,” he confides [4]. This cathartic process becomes the driving force behind his creation.
Homosexuality, a central element of his identity, is reflected in his work without ever falling into simplistic militancy. His young men, often depicted in ambiguous postures between vulnerability and power, embody a complex masculinity, far from stereotypes. In this, Bisky joins a long artistic tradition that, from Michelangelo to Francis Bacon, questions the representations of the male body. But he adds his own contemporary sensibility, nourished by current gay culture and the aesthetics of social networks.
On closer inspection, Bisky develops a whole visual anthropology. His floating bodies, suspended or falling, become the perfect metaphors for a human condition marked by instability and loss of reference points. In this, he far exceeds the framework of his personal history to touch on the universal. Is it not our entire era that seems to be in perpetual free fall, between climatic catastrophes, political crises and digital vertigo?
The stay in Madrid in the 1990s constitutes a major turning point in his journey. The discovery of the great Spanish masters at the Prado, Goya, Ribera, Zurbarán, deeply influenced his palette and his approach to representation. “I was terribly poor and my studio was smaller than the canvas, so I went to the Prado and copied the old masters,” he recalls [5]. This immersion in Spanish baroque painting opens up new perspectives for him, notably in the treatment of light and bodies.
Over the years, Bisky’s work underwent a significant evolution, moving from the pastel and luminous tones of his early days to darker and more dramatic atmospheres. This change is not insignificant. It testifies to a progressive awareness of the violence and tensions that traverse our world. The attacks of September 11, 2001 constitute a first shock. Then, in 2008, Bisky finds himself in Mumbai during the terrorist attacks that strike the city. “Before that, I saw terrorism as something bad, but as something that did not affect me, it was like watching images of fire on television. And there I was right in the middle of it,” he confides [6].
This traumatic experience fed a series of works where violence erupts more directly. The bodies no longer just float; they explode, fragment, dislocate. The palette becomes more contrasted, the compositions more chaotic. Yet, even in these apocalyptic scenes, Bisky maintains a form of troubling, almost decadent beauty. This is the whole fascinating ambiguity of his painting: it attracts us with its technical virtuosity and chromatic intensity, while confronting us with our deepest fears.
Religion constitutes another guiding thread of his work, in constant dialogue with the communist heritage of his childhood. Bisky grew up in an officially atheistic system, but religious symbols and stories have always fascinated him, as evidenced by his exhibition “Pompa” presented in St. Matthäus Church in Berlin in 2019. This tension between political ideology and spirituality feeds a large part of his work, notably in his way of approaching the themes of fall, sacrifice and redemption.
If we were to look for parallels in literature to understand Bisky’s universe, it would be towards Albert Camus that we would have to turn. The author of “The Fall” explored with similar acuity the existential questions of a man confronted with the absurdity of the world and his own finitude. Bisky’s characters, like Camus’ Clamence, seem suspended in a vertiginous in-between, halfway between sky and earth, between innocence and guilt.
Bisky’s pictorial universe irresistibly evokes the Nabokovian aesthetic. There are deep affinities between the German artist and the Russo-American writer: both excel in the art of transforming the fall into a transcendent aesthetic experience. Like Nabokov who, in “Lolita” or “Pale Fire”, deploys dazzling prose to explore moral abysses, Bisky metamorphoses existential vertigo into tableaux of poignant beauty. This ability to transfigure anguish into formal rapture, this way of creating complex visual structures where fragmentation becomes a principle of organization, undeniably brings these two creators closer together, whom everything, however, seemed to separate.
Literature and painting are two ways of approaching the world, of deciphering it and reinventing it. Bisky, an avid cinephile, also draws from the seventh art to feed his imagination. German expressionist cinema, with its marked contrasts and dreamlike atmospheres, resonates in some of his compositions. But it is perhaps with Fellini, with his mix of realism and fantasmagoria, that we would find the most obvious correspondences with Bisky’s visual universe.
The human body, in Bisky’s work, is never simply a body. It is a political battlefield, a contested territory, a place where the tensions of history are inscribed. In this, the artist joins the concerns of contemporary sociology, notably in his way of approaching questions of gender, power and identity. His young men, both objects of desire and political subjects, embody the contradictions of an era that oscillates between emancipation and new forms of social control.
The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, with its analyses of the mechanisms of symbolic domination and social reproduction, offers precious keys to decipher Bisky’s work. The artist does not illustrate these theories, but he embodies them in images, in bodies and situations that speak to us directly. How is identity constructed in a world in transition? How do social structures shape our most intimate desires? These questions run through his entire work.
Through the meticulous study of Bisky’s personal and artistic trajectory, we see the portrait of contemporary Germany taking shape, with its fractures, traumas and hopes. The artist thus becomes, almost despite himself, a privileged witness to the social and political mutations that have shaken his country since reunification. His paintings tell a collective story through the prism of an individual experience.
What strikes in Bisky’s journey is his ability to constantly reinvent himself without ever denying his fundamental obsessions. Each new series brings its share of visual surprises, but fits into a deep coherence. The artist does not hesitate to take risks, to thwart the expectations of his collectors, to explore new territories. “I stopped working with him, and leaving the gallery, I said to myself: ‘This is my life, let’s make paintings that look completely different.’ So I did it, I changed my style, and I tried to find my freedom again”, he confides about a too directive gallery owner [7].
This independence of mind is undoubtedly what makes Bisky’s strength in the current artistic landscape. At a time when so many artists are content to reproduce proven formulas, he continues to explore, to question, to question himself. His Berlin studio is a laboratory where the drama of creation is played out every day, with its moments of exaltation and periods of doubt. “Sometimes, around 4:30 in the morning, I realize that I have just messed up the painting. So I have to take a knife and destroy it”, he admits [8].
This radical honesty in the face of the creative process is all the more remarkable in an art market often dominated by mercantile considerations. Bisky paints first for himself, driven by an inner necessity that transcends fashions and trends. “The main vital energy I have goes into my painting. I try to put my life into it too”, he affirms [9]. This authenticity is immediately felt in front of his works.
The title of his exhibition “Balagan” (2015), a Hebrew word meaning “chaos”, sums up the nature of his work well: an apparent disorder that hides a deep structure, a fertile confusion from which striking visions emerge. His stay in Israel, like those in Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai, fed his imagination with contrasting experiences, between beauty and violence, between enjoyment and threat. Painting then becomes a way to give form to these contradictions, to make them visible and perhaps, momentarily, bearable.
For ultimately, this is what it is all about: making the world habitable despite its horrors, finding a form of beauty in chaos. Bisky’s art, like that of the great tragedians, does not turn us away from the abyss; it allows us to contemplate it without losing ourselves entirely. His paintings are visual tightrope exercises where the balance is always precarious but never broken.
In our era obsessed with ephemeral digital images, Bisky’s painting affirms the necessity of a slower, more attentive, deeper gaze. “I want to put my perspective of our time into my paintings, because most of the messages we share on the Internet or via our phones will disappear. Painting is slow, but it also lasts longer”, he explains [10]. This conviction in the durability of pictorial art is also an act of resistance against the generalized acceleration of our lives.
Norbert Bisky occupies a singular place in contemporary German and international art today. Neither entirely mainstream nor claiming marginality, he pursues his path with remarkable constancy. His recent exhibitions, “Mirror Society” at the SCAD Museum of Art (2022), “Taumel” at the König Galerie in Berlin (2022) or “DISINFOTAINMENT” at the G2 Kunsthalle in Leipzig (2021), confirm the vitality of his approach and his ability to renew himself.
For some superficial critics, Bisky remains “the gay German painter” or “the child of the GDR”. These reductive labels miss the essential: the richness of a work that, beyond frozen identities, questions our common humanity in what it has of most fragile and most intense. His paintings speak to us of fall, but also of flight; of fragmentations, but also of connections; of losses, but also of possible reconstructions.
So, what remains when everything collapses? “Nothing. Or the light”, Bisky replies [11]. This laconic response contains all the wisdom of his art. Faced with the ever-looming void, he opposes not dogmatic certainties, but the stubborn persistence of a pictorial light. This light which, from the ethereal pastels of his early works to the violent contrasts of his recent canvases, has never ceased to illuminate his work.
Bisky’s work is a bridge thrown between worlds that everything seems to oppose: East and West, communism and capitalism, pictorial tradition and contemporary sensibility, classical beauty and modern chaos. By crossing this bridge, we do not find definitive answers, but an invitation to live fully in the contradictions of our time. And that is perhaps the greatest gift an artist can give us today.
- Excerpt from an interview with Norbert Bisky, Collectors Agenda, 2016.
- Jörg Harlan Rohleder, “The Man Who Dreams Pictures”, König Galerie, 2017.
- Odrija Kalve, “A Way to Be Happy”, Arterritory, 2016.
- Jurriaan Benschop, “Norbert Bisky”, Artforum, 2013.
- Interview with Norbert Bisky, König Galerie, 2017.
- Odrija Kalve, “A Way to Be Happy”, Arterritory, 2016.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Jörg Harlan Rohleder, “The Man Who Dreams Pictures”, König Galerie, 2017.
- Odrija Kalve, “A Way to Be Happy”, Arterritory, 2016.
- Jörg Harlan Rohleder, “The Man Who Dreams Pictures”, König Galerie, 2017.
