Norbert Bisky

Norbert Bisky paints intensely coloured figurative scenes of beauty, sexuality, violence and destruction, drawn from personal experience, travels in Brazil and the flood of media images. His figures, often young men, are fragmentary and disjointed, falling, suspended in mid-air or hanging upside down. The bright, seductive surfaces draw on the aesthetics of East German socialist realism and of capitalist advertising, treating the male body as an ideologically charged subject and turning it towards questions of freedom, loss and identity. Bisky breaks forms apart and sets blocks of saturated colour against each other, pushing figuration towards abstraction. In his mirror works, painted canvases are cut up and arranged like collages on reflective surfaces, with fragmented faces and pieces of urban culture, so that the room and the viewer become part of the image. His works on paper include series of intertwined bodies, wrestlers whose struggle could be athletic or sexual, and he also works for the stage.