Norbert Bisky valuation
East German socialist realism, learned and then turned inside out.
Norbert Bisky was born in Leipzig in 1970, grew up in what he has called a very Communist family in East Germany, and was nineteen when the Wall fell.
What a work by Norbert Bisky is worth
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Bio
Norbert Bisky was born in Leipzig in 1970, grew up in what he has called a very Communist family in East Germany, and was nineteen when the Wall fell. He studied under Georg Baselitz at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin. The paintings take the visual language he grew up surrounded by — the blond, healthy, optimistic bodies of socialist realist propaganda — and put them into scenes of collapse, falling, violence and eroticism, painted in high-keyed pinks, blues and yellows that keep the propaganda brightness while removing anything it was promising. He has continued to work in Berlin and has made large-scale commissions for public and religious buildings.
Bisky's market is essentially a painting market, with unique canvases in oil on canvas or on board, and the large multi-figure compositions well ahead of the single-figure studies. There is a smaller output of works on paper and a limited number of print editions. Because so much of the work depends on the exact temperature of the colour, condition of the surface and any past varnishing or retouching matter more than usual, and signature and dating are normally on the reverse rather than the face.
Baselitz, Madrid and the Berghain ballet
Bisky studied painting at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin from 1994 to 1999 as a master student of Georg Baselitz, and in Jim Dine's class at the Salzburg Summer Academy. A year in Madrid as an exchange student in 1995 brought him to Goya, Zurbarán and Ribera.
In 2013 he designed his first stage set, for Masse by the Berlin State Ballet, which opened at the Berghain nightclub. He was represented by König Galerie until 2023 and by Esther Schipper from March 2025, and also shows with Fabienne Levy in Lausanne.
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