5 - Norbert Bisky

Norbert Bisky Worship Tropicale 2018 Oil on canvas 170 x 130 cm. Signed, dated and titled 'bisky 2018 "WORSHIP TROPICALE" Bisky '2018' verso on canvas. Provenance Cokkie Snoei, Rotterdam (2019); private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia Exhibitions Rotterdam 2018/2019 (Cokkie Snoei), Boezemvriend “Norbert Bisky repeatedly speaks in his interviews of the ‘false paradises’ he encounters throughout his life. His paintings reflect to inner struggles over identity in a world of false promises. In doing so, he deliberately draws on the people in his immediate surroundings and contemporary life, as well as on bold, striking colours that emphasise the artificiality of the narratives depicted.” (Katja Blomberg, Dream and Trauma, in: Norbert Bisky, Ich war’s nicht, exhibition catalogue, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, 2008, p.11) Viewed from a steep low angle, "Worship Tropicale" opens up to a luminous sky in shades of turquoise, light blue, violet, and pink, interspersed with wisps of white clouds. Three large banana leaves extend diagonally into the picture. In the upper right, a young man with a bare torso peeks out from behind one of the leaves, half-concealed, his eyes fixed directly on the viewer. He appears to be carrying someone on his shoulders. At the lower left, another man’s head protrudes into the picture, eyes closed and mouth slightly open. In between, fragments of leaves and small particles of colour drift through the pictorial space as if swirled by the wind. Bisky grew up in the GDR. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he studied under Georg Baselitz at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He had been familiar with the visual world of Socialist Realism since childhood, and from early on, the artist embraced this aesthetic of idealised youth and combined it with motifs from advertising and pop culture. Since then, young, athletic men have been a constant feature of his body of work, paradise a recurring motif, linked to a longing for ease and freedom. The tropical vegetation that began to appear in his paintings around 2017 stems from his stays in Rio de Janeiro – a city where paradise and violence exist side by side (cf. König Galerie, Norbert Bisky, Trilemma, exhib. text, Berlin 2017, www.koeniggalerie.com, accessed 5.10.2026). Sky, leaves, bodies: Bisky paints familiar images of longing while simultaneously causing them to falter. It is precisely this tension that makes the painting so captivating.