Chaotic explosions, ambiguous physical struggles between male figures, and nostalgic smiling young models typify the contradictory images in the paintings of Norbert Bisky. The German artist’s canvases are executed with a flat, straightforward application of sumptuously colored paint, laid down in brisk gestures that parallel the dynamism of the works’ content. Drawing on a range of sources, from the Socialist Realism art and propaganda of his youth in the former German Democratic Republic to Christian symbols to homoerotic imagery, the artist presents viewers with complex compositions that suggest — yet ultimately confound — perceptible narratives.
In Mirror Society, the artist presents a series of recent works uniquely collaged with canvas from previous paintings that has been slashed and reapplied to a mirrored surface. These composite arrangements deconstruct the figure into fragments of torsos, limbs, and faces violently intersecting with abstracted bursts of saturated color and the mirrors’ fractal reflections. The viewer is confronted with half-hidden, half-bared images of beautiful youth as well as their own gaze, trapped in a voyeuristic feedback loop. With these works, Bisky comments on the narcissism of a society deeply engaged in the production and consumption of a dizzying onslaught of images in viral media, ambivalent to the violence and turmoil of global events.