Norbert Bisky — Decompression — Templon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 5 → December 31, 2011

Young German painter Norbert Bisky is unveiling a series of spectacular works for his first show at Galerie Templon. The exhibition, entitled _Decompression___ features a blend of eroticism and violence.

Norbert Bisky’s figurative style of painting, conjuring up the socialist realism he experienced as a child in GDR, is striking in its use of shimmering colours and its apocalyptic visions. Peopled by beautiful young men, his work depicts ambiguous scenes that lie somewhere between natural catastrophe, battlefield and a desert of ruins. Norbert Bisky likes to connect chaos and beauty. He combines elements of our contemporary hedonistic culture with leftovers of the ideological ages.

In Decompression the artist recreates a world that no longer exists, that of the “false promises” held out by the communism of his youth. He is also bearing witness to the fast changing developments of the city of Berlin, his home since the 1980s.

Further influences derive from the artist’s obsessions, losses and traumas, from the memory of orgiastic club nights to the 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.

The exhibition’s title may thus be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s creativity: Norbert Bisky is releasing the pressure and exorcising his nightmares through his art, in what is seen as a cathartic process. Decompression is a dangerous phenomenon, causing damage to anyone experiencing overly rapid pressure changes. This “sickness” corresponds to the uncertainties of the modern world, its crises and catastrophes..

_Born in 1970 in Leipzig, Norbert Bisky experienced the fall of the Berlin wall as an explosion of freedom. So he decided to become a painter. He studied with Georg Baselitz in Berlin then with Jim Dine. In 1995, the artist spent a year in Madrid immersing himself in Francisco de Goya’s work.

His treatment of landscapes and exploration of the portrait and narrative structure place him firmly in the tradition of European painting. But Norbert Bisky’s experiments with breaking down forms and blocks of colour sometimes put him on the borderline of abstraction.

Norbert Bisky has already exhibited in numerous institutions, including the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (2003), Museum für Moderne Kunst PMMK in Ostend (2003), National Museum of Korea in Seoul (2004) and Dortmunder KKunstverein (Dortmund, 2009). In 2011, he took part in the Tous cannibales exhibition shown at the Maison Rouge in Paris, then in me Collectors Room in Berlin. His works feature in a variety of collections, including at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.