Norbert Bisky P.L.U.R.IUM, 2024

Norbert Bisky’s painting depicts the ruin of a plane—a real-life site on the coast of Iceland where the stripped trunk of a DC3 abandoned by the US military in 1973 has become a tourist attraction—set in a colorful space with five white human figures, scantily dressed.

Drawing on a major theme in his oeuvre—the Berlin club scene of the 1990s, with its raves held in abandoned industrial sites—P.L.U.R.ium is also an acknowledgement of history. Hopeful and hedonistic, that specific moment of Berlin subculture has past, a fact to which the title, with its acronym for the credo of ravers, Peace Love Unity Respect, alludes when it adds the suffix -ium, making it sound vaguely akin to a chemical element.

While the ruin symbolizes this passage of time, it also alludes to Romantisms’ faible for faux ruins, found in many mid-19th century parks or depicted in Romantic painting, for example in Caspar David Friedrich’s work. The plane is its equivalent: a ruin of the industrial age, now a site of tourist pilgrimages.