Zentrifuge

Norbert Bisky’s artistic cosmos is as colorful as it is gruesome. Many of his figurative paintings are suffused with densely packed body parts—heads, torsos, arms—caught in flood waves and wedged into one another. Orange skin tones, light pink, green, yellow, and violet against radiant blue or somber black-brown dominate the palette, an intense chromaticity that often contrasts with the themes of the paintings: nude male bodies are torn apart, handsome faces mangled. Bisky’s powerful painting engenders ambivalent feelings in which he explores the boundaries of representation. The publication provides a first, long-overdue art-historical examination of Bisky’s oeuvre. Hubertus Gaßner, Kathleen Bühler, Dorothée Brill, and other authors pursue the questions prompted by this vehement style of painting: Why this brutal treatment of the body and its image? Why the decomposition of figuration and fixed structures? Where is Bisky to be positioned?