KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Norbert Bisky

Painting

Norbert Bisky’s first big individual exhibition in Germany will be presented in Studio 1 of the Künstlerhaus, showing work by an internationally acclaimed artist whose recent paintings have included a disturbing element. They depict well-proportioned, sporting, always radiant, blond and blue-eyed boys or young men, romping in cheerful groups, playing sport and games in settings which are not precisely defined. Due to the missing context, it is initially impossible for the viewer to determine whether the heroic notion of the youth movements and their totalitarian aesthetics is being celebrated here, or whether the artist is subjecting them to ambiguous criticism. But in the course of critical analysis, a subtle painterly argumentation comes to the fore, gradually suppressing the ideal of the body and replacing this with autonomous self-reflection on and by painting. Casting into hell and hints of the Baroque develop into a revocation of the dictatorship of the body and ideology; the viewer is compelled to come to his own conclusions.

A new phase in Bisky’s work is marked by a sculpture hanging from the ceiling of Studio 1, which transposes the artist’s method and language of motifs into three-dimensional space.

Exhibition
05.05. – 25.09.2005
Wed - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
04.05.2005
7 - 10 pm

Studio 1, Bethanien