MARK GISBOURNE
Mark GisbourneNorbert Bisky
Among the most successful of the new generation of German painters his works often create a puzzle for the viewer. For as paintings they do not pursue the flatness and two dimensionality of high modernism, and neither do they show the at times acerbic neo-expressionism of his teacher Georg Baselitz. Though the manner in which the white gesso-ed ground stands in for light reveals a clear awareness and knowledge of post-impressionist practices found at the beginnings of ‘the modern’. But, this said, Bisky is definitively a figurative painter and he makes no bones about it. The past is an open territory to be visited and appropriated at will.
Born at Leipzig during the former DDR, he often speaks of the ideological certainties that turned out for him to be the stolen childhood of retrospect. And, it is, perhaps, the principle of lost certainties that most colours the timbre of his paintings. On the surface they appear paintings of luminous celebration, masking the hidden disturbance and anxiety that shaped their development. Having studied through the second half of the 90s at the Hochschule der Künste, and in the master class of Georg Baselitz in Berlin, the paintings reveal a resistance to, as much as an embracing of the general tenets his teacher espoused. Baselitz’s strategy was to challenge and prevaricate over why a young painter should seek to paint, to suggest to Bisky that he pursue the life of an artist rather than the self –awareness of a painter conscious of the fact he was painting.
Putting the polemics aside, in the reality Norbert Bisky is decidedly a painter in every respect, using invariably oil on canvas or cotton duck, save for the watercolours on paper that serve both as studies and autonomous works. His large studio, necessary given the scale of his paintings that can be up to five meters in size (a scale commensurate with the great tableaux of the baroque and history painting), is for the most part flooded with light from its windows and is traditionally north facing. Similarly, his brush handling is well trained and classical revealing all techniques and skills of a studio painter.
The repetition of subject contents, as distinct from a specific reading of subject matter, is something he shares with the modern, though it could equally be argued as being true to earlier workshop or atelier practices. The near perfect blond and blue-eyed youth that appear wrestle with each other, they fight and contest, they play would be soldiers, and they gambol and fall in every sort of configuration, and when women appear they do so largely in ironic form. However, the relations between the figures show little by way of intimacy or affective sharing. There interactions is as much about the theatre (but not theatrical), or staging of youth, and Bisky is fully aware of the danger this poses in engaging with the images of young that have become toboo-ed in terms of their historical associations with German history. In fact they owe far more to his own youth growing up in the DDR, and his involvement with the Pioneers and summer camps he took part in his adolescent years. Yes, it is quite clear that these simulacra youth are beautiful, handsome, and prone to evoke a certain voyeurism in the viewer.
But that is the point, he is so fully aware of it, that the youths become ironic metaphors rather than having any true substance in the world.
This is particularly evident in the recent paintings, which point, it might be said, to both the dream and terror of perfection. The tension is wrought because it challenges the adverting stereotype that we all like to imagine and succumb to, namely that the beautiful, but in this instance they have turned into flesh eating cannibals. One might like to think of Goya in this respect, but Bisky’s paintings possess nothing that is obviously sallow and macabre as one would expect to find in the Spanish master, being painted with areas of sky blue and the fresh flesh tones of youth. They are the eternal sunny days of would be monsters, and in consequence the visual contents as subject matter throw the viewer into a world of estrangement and provocation. It is, perhaps, this very estrangement that gives his paintings their hypnotic power.
Norbert Bisky’s outward personality is open, honest, and joyous, hiding, perhaps, the secrecy and self-doubt that every painter feels in their day-to-day studio practice. And, clearly for the painter Bisky a certain inversion has taken place, when thinking of the childhood certainties he once possessed, and the subsequent disillusionment that ensued when discovered the truth of his former Nation State. It might well be, and it is only speculation, that his paintings are re-inscription of that past, a personal catharsis on the way to finding an eventual meaning, an aimed for fulfillment that brings a sense of comprehension to his past. However, it is not in any sense an illustration, but the thing made is never completely free from the person who made it.
from: "Berlin Art Now/ London 2006, pp. 10-19."