Norbert Bisky Volunteer II, 2025
Oil on canvas
50 x 40 cm
The portrait-like image of a young man against a painterly multicolored background, his eyes shining, skin flecked by bright lights and dark hair by specks of color, draws on Norbert Bisky’s characteristic depictions of Berlin club culture.
Born into a family loyal to the regime in what was then communist East Germany, Bisky's biography is an important factor to understand his iconography. His figures, mostly young men, initially drew on the imagery of totalitarian regimes and capitalist propaganda, which generally portrayed the male body in ideologically charged ways: as a conventionally beautiful, athletic, and healthy body, as a soldier, worker, or consumer object. In Bisky's paintings the glistening bodies are both attractive and joyful, yet their depictions are on second view also fragmentary, their bodies disjointed in the light. Often located in a precarious space—falling, suspended in mid-air or hanging upside down—their untetheredness is a formal expression of an existential state. To Bisky the dissolution of East Germany represented simultaneously loss and gain—as an entire system vanished, a point of familiar orientation fell away but so did its restraining and disciplining bondage, giving him the freedom to choose his way of life and to become an artist. To Bisky, the Berlin club scene of the 1990s stood out as a moment of great historical promise and came to represent this freedom.