Norbert Bisky
East German socialist realism, learned and then turned inside out.
Norbert Bisky was born in East Berlin in 1970, the son of a senior figure in the East German communist party, and was sixteen at the Wall's fall. 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.
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