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Katja Blomberg
Dream and Trauma

The decision to become a painter was made in 1989, at the time the wall came down. Norbert Bisky lived through those events in East-Berlin. He was nineteen, came from a family of staunch communists and had occasionally visited the Alte Nationalgalerie to marvel at Walter Leistikow’s painting “Grunewaldsee” which was refused by the jury in 1898. The landscape by the early progressive, who founded in the Berlin Secession together with Max Liebermann, had drawn the teenage Bisky’s imagination towards the lakes of West-Berlin. When freedom came, he went there straight away. It was a few more years until he painted “Grunewaldsee” in 1998. Now the two versions, by Leistikow and Bisky, hang side by side in the exhibition “ich war’s nicht” (“it wasn’t me”). The one painted before 1900 is steeped in red evening-light and eschews all human figures. The other reassesses the subject of melancholic loneliness in a colorful day trip of four young friends with a tent on the lakeside. Yet Bisky, too, indicates the analogy of loneliness between lake and soul in the single figure in the foreground.

Bisky’s connection to landscape is evident in nearly all his paintings. Nature lends space to his scenes in day- and night-versions: to begin with, there are competitions between boys, scuffling with fists, setting off grenades, pointing rifles or resorting to drink. More recently, the subjects become more complex, the statements more political, crops of hair and eyes more colorful. In the night-scenes with their dark backgrounds there is intoxicated dreaming, coupling, gorging, killing; it is brutal, desperate, addicted, fast and with absolute indulgence: the scenes extend far beyond general everyday consciousness. However, landscape is also seen separately in Bisky’s early paintings: serenely tempered, they always look to the skies; a perspective that the artist clearly prefers to this day.

Despite the nature-motiv Bisky reflects foremost contemporary urban life in Berlin. Here a club scene has taken root that is without parallel even by international standards. To the rhythm of hard beats it attends to all cravings and inclinations all of the time. Yet even this background motif forms only one aspect of this approach to painting that is wholly oriented towards catharsis and which hold up a mirror to both the paradise pledged by the GDR and all the other promises of happiness which are steered by marketing, bored by consumption and oriented towards the media. This kind of decreed, religiously overdrawn cheeriness, which reminds us not only of the GDR but also of the consumerist present, is exaggerated by Bisky without communicating directly the critical rift in his treatment of the picture’s message. He rather leaves it into the trap of the apparent propaganda painting or simply to be excited by the beauty of the paintings. He always nudges the suggestions of ironical-critical undertones from the outside, by way of his titles: “Zonensommer” (summer in the Soviet sector), “Ducken und Durchhalten” (duck and hold out), “ Freitag wird gebadet” (Friday we have our baths), “Übung” (exercise), “Attacke” (attack), are the humorously-bitter titles from the jargon of comics. Then there are names such as “Jünger” (disciple), “David Tropical”, “Himmelfahrt in Friedrichshain” (Ascension Day in Friedrichshain), “Alaska Judith”, which refer to biblical themes or characters. As contemporaries they appear in the roles of those protagonists who have been the heroes and victims in European painting for centuries. Bisky works on his dreams and traumata in the shape of ultra fit contemporaries playing the parts of martyrs. On this road he meets, during a year of studies in 1995 in Spain, his great idol Goya whose paintings he copies among many others at the Prado Museum and whom he reflects directly in his own work from 1998. Thus “ich war’s nicht” came about like a late echo of Goya’s famous “The Third of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid” (1814): insurgents within French occupied Madrid had tried to prevent the departure, ordered by Napoleon, of the Spanish king’s brother. During the night of May 2/3, forty-five of them were executed by firing-squad. Bisky’s contemporary interpretation shows a boy before a pink background who casually ambles past the row of GDR policemen with guns at the ready. The gesture of state violence, which Bisky just like Goya worked on years after the event, slides into the farcical in the face of the demonstrative freedom of the individual.

In an interview with the artist K.R.H. Sonderborg – reprinted in this catalogue – Bisky asks of the elder colleague whether he had experienced a similar sensation of freedom in 1945 as he himself did in 1989 when the wall came down. Sonderborg agrees enthusiastically: “That was fascinating thought, simply to do what one wanted to, mind-boggling!” Out of this dynamism Sonderborg developed in the years that followed an abstract body of paintings full of electrifying energy. He was totally under the spell of American Jazz. As different as the two biographies may appear: Sonderborg was nineteen when, in 1941, he was arrested on charges of Anglophilia by the Gestapo. Later he was celebrated for precisely that reason as a German star in New York. Bisky awoke from the phoney paradise of a childhood (that was intact itself) and woke up to yet more false if new promises. Both artists experienced on the threshold of adulthood a historic rift of global proportions, which affected their work in an immediate and positive way. Moreover, both got the chance to view their country from the outside for a while, both love jazz music, both are the very opposite of aggressive; they are spontaneous, open-minded, disciplined and highly inquisitive characters. This makes the internal tension and alert dynamism of their works, which are separated by nearly two generations, comparable on the abstract-energetic level.

It is also mainly the internal relations, which explain Bisky’s closeness to his teachers Georg Baselitz and Jim Dine. During a number of summer academies in the Austrian city of Salzburg towards the end of the 1990s, the American supported the young East German with his own confident artistic generosity, which together with its human warmth for the first time gave Bisky the impression of being taken seriously as an artist and a person. Apart from the technical quality as a painter Bisky concentrated on Dine’s drawings, which the latter made during a stay in Munich in 1987 and 1988 in Munich Glyptothek after a classical Greek sculptures and which particularly inspired Bisky in his own handling of figure.

According to Georg Baselitz artists are inventors. They discover things, which they did not know they were looking for. For this reason Bisky does not start from the immediate experience but from memory. The act of painting, according to Baselitz, requires the artist to detach himself from the profane surroundings and experience the material perception as emotional and intellectual stimulation. Painting focuses the attention and realizes recollections. If there at all reasons for decision, they are in the end neither comprehensible nor can they be consciously traced. The artist construes his own past by working out experiences and thus recreating them while at the same time shaping them according to his needs.

These thoughts, which Baselitz noted down in 2003 for a catalogue published in New York by Gallery Werner, match precisely the attitude of his former master-student Norbert Bisky. He works in voluntary isolation in Eastern Berlin. On his own, without the help of assistants, he deploys the full range of his optical impressions in the world of paintings. In this process, Bisky mostly starts with Polaroids. He plans a scene on the basis of preliminary sketches and transfers it to his either extremely large or very small formats. He does not like to leave things to chance yet is surprised by the results which the inherent dynamics of the paintings sometimes throw back at him. Thus “Armageddon” (2007) was originally planned as a scene from a party before the work took on a doomsday mood. This is not least indicated by the belated title, which refers to an American disaster movie fro 1998. “Harmagedon”, the place of the last battle, at the same time recalls the Book of Revelation. The term appears only once throughout the Bible, which does not prevent some Christian sects to turn it into the central concept of their interpretations of the scripture that centre on the imminent apocalypse they are confidently expecting. Bisky paints this struggle between God and Evil in which he depicts David playing his customary role of the hero in the bloodbath. In the background Love and Death clash grossly, in a manner reminiscent of Hieronymos Bosch, in a gloomily rebellious landscape. Earthquakes and floods leave houses, boulders, poles of power lines and humans at the mercy of the elements.

Bisky’s more recent drastic narrative style is very much evident in “Sputum”(2007): before a night sky of glowing red a strong stream of blood issues from the mouth of a man. A teeming flock of pigeons seems to expect refreshment from its contents. “Sputum” is a medical term denoting a secretion of the mucus membranes mixed with leftovers of food as well as saliva, dust, germs, pus and, in the worst case, blood. The stream of color could be interspersed with poisonous word and bogus promises.

A good deal more abstract, Katharina Grosse creates iridescent color-streams, which seize entire rooms in the overwhelming drama they exude. Her vehement artistic access compares in its radicalism to Bisky’s: Grosse employs her spray-paintings to transform spaces into walk-through pictorial landscapes. They confront the viewers’ emotion with archaic forces of nature – and it’s is not clear, whether these forces cost or give lives in the here and now.

The two more recent positions of Nicole Eisenman and Anthony Goicolea have an immediate iconographic affinity to Bisky’s early works from the period just after 2000: Eisenman displays interwoven human bodies like naked landscapes, which deal with mass hysteria or misanthropy, while the video artist Goicolea, in his photo series “America 1971”, invents a paradise where in an atmosphere of absolute cleanliness – in this instance a swimming pool – boys fish for boys.

Norbert Bisky talks in his interviews time and again about the “false paradises” he encounters in his life. His paintings bear witness to internal struggles for identity in a world of false promises. In this process he rigorously keeps to the personnel of his own environment and times as well as to billboard colors, which underscore the artificiality of the narrative. By way of the contents of his paintings he also consciously aligns himself with the tradition of painting in the occident from Rubens and Caravaggio all the way to Goya and Leistikow. He reminds us of timeless matters that have been fixed on paper and canvas by humanity for more than a thousand years – in order to lessen the burden of life.

From: catalogue “ich war’s nicht”, pp.79-82.