Norbert Bisky — Works on paper — Templon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 7 → July 23, 2014

German painter Norbert Bisky is returning to Galerie Daniel Templon this summer with a new and spectacular series of works on paper. The artist is releasing his demons with a series of previously unseen watercolours and oil paintings on paper that play on the conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct.

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 festivities. Norbert Bisky likes to create a link between chaos and beauty. He combines elements taken from our contemporary hedonistic culture with reminiscences of past ideologies.

Norbert Bisky’s watercolours contrast with his oil paintings and seem to be totally disconnected from reality. Bodies inhabit a universe made up of sensations that are as joyful as they are morbid, but with no indication of space or time. The landscapes of this universe emerge thanks to the palette of colours, ranging from sensual pink to blood red and idyllic blue. Norbert Bisky is particularly fond of the technique that centres on spontaneity and the opportunity to be seized, in total harmony with the tension created by these Baroque dramas.

Norbert Bisky

Born in 1970 in Leipzig, Norbert Bisky experienced the fall of the Berlin war 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 great European painting. But Norbert Bisky’s experiments with breaking down forms and blocks of colour sometimes put him on the borderline of abstract art.

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), Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund, 2009) and Haifa Museum of Art in Israel (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, the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris. The Rostock KunstHalle is organising a major retrospective of his work to be held in late 2014.