until 05.11. | #3606ARTatBerlin | ARTES Berlin presents from 14. September 2022 the exhibition Normaler Heldenalltag by artist Norbert Bisky.
ARTES Berlin is showing more than 25 works by the artist Norbert Bisky in a solo show entitled “Normaler Heldenalltag”. The presented unique works, watercolours, editions and paintings shed light on the early work of the Berlin artist. Bisky is considered one of the most influential painters of the “New Figuration”. He grew up in the GDR and was influenced by the flood of images of socialist realism. He was encouraged by Georg Baselitz, whose master student he is, to deal with the images of his childhood. In 1995, the artist spent a year in Madrid and intensively studied the oeuvre of Francisco de Goya and Jusepe de Ribera. The massive, defined bodies typical of Baroque painting and their physical studies seem to have manifested themselves in the artist’s figurative vocabulary. He translates the propaganda of the Counter-Reformation into the present as a painter of modern martyrdoms, but without explicit depictions of violence.
His painterly excursions into landscape subjects and his exploration of portraiture and narrative structure place him in the tradition of great European painting. His work is, as it were, an experiment with the dissolution of forms and colour surfaces, which also leads him to the border of abstraction. Bisky knows no horror vacui, white space seems to give him pleasure and to be an (in)painterly stylistic device, lateral arabesques are dispensed with. Adolf Loos postulated about 100 years ago: “Ornament is a crime”, a credo that Bisky follows, especially in his early works.
His oeuvre moves on several levels and thus oscillates between realism, abstraction, gestural painting and colour field work, using all these means to create a cheerfully threatening vision: Painted Ambivalence. The contrast between the joyfully polychromatic world and the young men playing, fighting and finding themselves in extreme situations fuels the drama and dynamism. The recipient is always wondering why it has to escalate. “I think it’s the tipping point, this explosion of possibilities. Freedom can also be threatening. Everything can change, for the better or for the worse. I try to make the multi-layeredness of moments and the tumult visible in the pictures,” Bisky answered in an interview when asked about a supposed threat in his pictures. He lives and works in Berlin.
Vernissage: Wednesday, 14. September 2022, 6 – 8 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Wednesday, 14. September bis Saturday, 5. November 2022
to the gallery
Image Title: Norbet Bisky – Blauvogel
Exhibition Norbert Bisky – ARTES Berlin | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin – Contemporary Art – Exhibitions Galerien Berlin | ART at Berlin