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?