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.
At a glance
- Born
- 1970, Leipzig
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.
Lenor, Tel Aviv and Rauschen
Bisky is the son of the politician Lothar Bisky and the younger brother of the journalist Jens Bisky. He did his military service in the East German army, and began by studying German and art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin before turning to painting. He once described his early pictures, glaring, bright paintings of young, strong, happy men and untouched nature, as washed with Lenor; titles such as Übung im Gelände of 2002 and Lazarett im Paradies of 2005 hint at the threat inside the idyll, and Goya stands behind works such as Allesfresser of 2005.
He was a guest professor at HEAD in Geneva from 2008 to 2010 and at the HBK Braunschweig from 2016 to 2018, and in 2015 he swapped studios for three months with the Tel Aviv artist Erez Israeli. Since May 2017 his large painting Vertigo has hung on the ground floor of Berghain, part of the club's art programme alongside work by Wolfgang Tillmans. For World Press Freedom Day on 3 May 2019 his painting Rauschen was printed on the front pages of many German daily newspapers, with the federation of German newspaper publishers.
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