Katja Blomberg
Norbert Bisky’s male portraits: No hope, no fear
Nothing in the clarity of his paintings is as unambiguous as it seems. Norbert Bisky is not the painter of a stratum of young males who meet in dark places and shed all vestiges of sexual convention. His art achieves more than an image of the male that is free of bourgeoise restraints. Bisky restores the might of the image to painting with illustrative pathos. In this context, male figures assume, by proxy, the roles of artist‘s self in its various moods. Like Caravaggio, like Goya or Francis Bacon, Bisky does not shun the more drastic aspects of life. Rather, he seeks them and conceives human existence as part of an overwhelming cosmos holding extremes of the internal as well as the external variety which stretch the physical and the mental to bursting-point. Being exposed to Bisky‘s large-scale canvasses is to have a sense of being drawn into the forceful events they represent. Bisky carries the viewer into the maelstrom of black images which, like visual storms, open visionary spaces. Dark skies burst wide open. Bodies emerge into the spotlight of turbulent rampancy. The paintings by the 40-year-old depict the world from their apocalyptic perspective. Love and death are very close to each other here. At times, they coincide. Future, past and present occur simultaneously in the lucid paintings. More than anything, they are biographical.
After his early childhood in Leipzig, Bisky spends his youth in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn. His family are communists. The room he shares with his younger brother is small. For four years they sleep on the same double sofa bed in the flat on the thirteenth floor. Meanwhile, the third brother, more than ten years his junior, has died. Bisky is nineteen when the wall comes down. From one day to the next, the world of his youth, thoroughly organised, angst-ridden, between pre-fab flat and weekend dacha, crashes. The yawning chasms of GDR-history cause a certain nausea. At the same time, Bisky is awake to the awe-inspiring freedom of the moment. His yearnings for the soulful landscapes of the paintings by Walter Leistikow, which he had often admired at the Nationalgalerie in the East-Berlin, are finally fulfilled by being able to visit them. He journeys to the Western part of the city, studies painting with Georg Baselitz at Hochschule der Künste in Charlottenburg, with Jim Dine during summer academies at Salzburg and works as a waiter at a luxury hotel in leafy Grunewald.
Even then, the Danish painter K.R.H. Sonderborg, two generations his senior, was among his absolute favourites. With him Bisky shares not only biographical details: Sonderborg stood on the verge of adulthood when World War II was over and he was discharged from a totalitarian regime into the utter liberty of an artist‘s existence. It is also the vehemence which the art informel painter Sonderborg brought to his jazz-driven, lightning-fast paintings that is alive in Bisky‘s pictures to this day. Thus it is always the unregulated, unobserved and elusive moment that energises his figures. The artist generates an electrifying immediacy. He involves the viewer without granting him the distance of an analytical recipient. From the outset, Bisky has employed the medium of painting to capture above all his own observations and moods with photographic precision. In doing so, he naturally assumes a male perspective. It is familiar to him, it offers him the best access to empathy. Women remain external to his paintings, inscrutably mask-like. His young men can be sensed. Constantly in motion, they and their gestures perpetuate the stereotype of the strong, healthy warrior who handles everything thrown at him and always defies destiny by being courageous and tough inside his steely body, even though blood already gushes from his lips and flesh oozes from his wounds.
Bisky finds gestures and figures in the street, in advertisements, in the observation of city life as well as in extensive travels which nourish his imagination with impressions from other parts of the globe. Nevertheless, his personae appear to be types, not individuals. Whether they have a beard or blond hair, the figures correspond to the artist in age and physique. The situations in which he places the figures draw on news items: storm and flood disasters in Louisiana or Pakistan, earthquakes in Haiti, large fires around Moscow. He collects further gestures and poses from glossy magazines. Here, athletic men can fly, spit fire, surf leisurely with one hand in a dark business suit, even jump high and long. Bisky takes on motifs which permanently surround us and assembles them in collages of drastic context that deal only in emotional acts: flight, help, love. There is no room for individual gesture in these intense paintings.
Bisky has lived through many of the events he paints: on the edge of the tsunami in Thailand, during the attacks on a famous Mumbai hotel or after the sudden death of his younger sibling. During such times, life means being thrown back on oneself. The seconds in which everything is hurt, when waves of love and loathing mingle, are brought to the canvas by Bisky with an immediacy supplementing K.R.H. Sonderborg‘s energy-charged paintings with a late variation which can be described as figurative art informel.
Consciously, Bisky regards himself as part of the European tradition of painting since the late 16th century. While the grace of a Sandro Botticelli is evident in the carefree figurative pictures of Bisky‘s earliest phase, after 2007 he creates dramatic scenes more reminiscent of Michelangelo Caravaggio, Jusepe de Ribera or Francisco de Goya‘s Black Paintings – which the latter made to ward off his very own insanity. Bisky was able to study in depth the great Spanish artists and their works at the Prado during a year-long study visit in the early 1990s. The drastic nature of baroque painting‘s gestures intimating mortality and the afterlife as well as figures appearing in the image seemingly out of nowhere are matched almost literally in Bisky‘s paintings. Here, the reference is both to the martyrdom suffered in this world and to the transcendent other. Manliness is recorded in terms of naked survival, not in the sense of heroic representation.
Three main aspects of Bisky‘s work come to the fore in this context: the martyrdom of love, the martyrdom of painting and the apocalyptic scenography of the world. The bound and blindfolded ones, the speechless, screaming in agony, driven to suicide, the humiliated, defiled and mangled, all fall into the first group. The same goes for the figure of Mary with the lecherous puppy in her arms or the empty coat against a black background, a pair of men embracing or two martyrs, kneeling and bound like living bombs before a blue ground. The images link personal experience and observations of media imagery with occidental Christian iconography since the 16th century. From this amalgam rises an explosive vision of our future.
All of his paintings contain, in the words of the artist, a religious nucleus. Bisky considers the religious moment an inalienable part of good painting. Similarly, he addresses his own martyrdom as a painter and in particular, in one picture, his own vanishing by overpainting his body in black. In other cases in point the painter plays with fire, abandons himself for a moment in the sensuality of listening within himself or invents a blue sky with broad brushstrokes. Finally, the artists portrays himself as a bearded old man in the pose of a prophet. The survival of fleeting experience through the invention of images, the self as an instrument in the perpetual chain of artistic generations – that is how Bisky paints; that is how he sees his role as a painter.
In stark contrast, events in the apocalyptic scenes of the two large formats appear like a collage. Floods, earthquakes, a solar eclipse, death and love are present in „Slump” (2008). Here, Bisky presents two male youths who drag a helpless body from the waters. This central gesture of the painting evokes a Deposition. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus take Christ down from the cross with the same gentle care as Bisky bestows on the drowning figure. An inverted power pole, tossed through the air, falls from the sky in the background like said cross. To the left and right, events dissolve into abstract, symmetrical signs, while on the roofs of the huts that have escaped destruction couples float angelically, exposed to nature, unashamedly indulging in love-making.
„Alles wird gut” (All will be well; 2009) extends the repertoire of previous disaster paintings and increases their drastic nature by not only destroying huts but blasting them through the air, by deploying victims, rescuers and rescued, in a circular motion of ascent and descent similar to late-mediaeval renditions of the Last Judgment. The divine judge descends from the heavens like a one-man flying rescue team who is not to be hindered by a floating traffic light that is changing to green. While Bisky seems to avail himself of the narrative devices of the comic strip in all this existential drama, we can discover them in the art of Hieronymus Bosch and even Raffaello Sanzio.
Bisky‘s male portraits are images of the fear of present day madness. As Goya painted panic, terror and hysteria in his Black Paintings after the Napoleonic Wars with an extremely revealing gaze from his soul, so does Bisky attempt to escape the times shaken by nightmares by translating them into painting. Like Caravaggio he surprises with an extraordinary realism that establishes a link between the sacred and the profane rooted in our contemporary world. The British artist and director Derek Jarman has staged the life of the homosexual, successful artist, who shirks none of the more drastic aspects of life, in his film „Caravaggio” – which had its premier during the 1986 Berlin film festival. Gestures, light and subject-matter of Caravaggio‘s encounter an artistic reflection in Bisky‘s art and remain alive in his visionary paintings which are deeply anchored in tradition.
(Translation: Volker Ellerbeck)