NORBERT BISKY
Studio Visit

Norbert Bisky’s studio, located in Berlin, provides rare insight into the process by which the Leipzig-born painter creates his vibrant scenes of spiraling, swirling male characters, surrounded by colourful fragments, rendered in minute detail. 

What is especially surprising is the fact that Bisky manages to paint his figures from multiple positions and angles, caught in an internal vortex, spreading out in many different directions simultaneously in scenes of combat, aggression, explosions, and war. This requires Bisky to work on his canvases both near and from afar, maintaining the tumultuous air that unites his pictures, while also holding to a level of precision that rewards close inspection. Bisky’s brush must reenact the very movement that it depicts, and for viewers, the act of taking in one of the artist’s works, is similarly demanding, to the eye, and to the body as it is placed before a scenography in which characters can merely respond to the pictorial turmoil taking place around them.

© All images Christian Werner