Norbert Bisky Mauerpark, 2025
Oil on canvas
200 x 150 cm
Mauerpark, executed in oil on canvas, references a park in Prenzlauer Berg, located in former East Berlin, in its title.
The painting depicts three male figures, topless, distributed throughout the picture plane. In the upper right of the canvas, a cat-like fox-colored figure that draws on a Disney-aesthetic makes an appearance, and gazes down at the carefree men.
The young men in Bisky’s work function as proxies for the fragile status of homoerotic aesthetics under totalitarian regimes, embodying their tension, vulnerability, and latent instability.
A recurring motif of Bisky's paintings are tromp l’oeil-like depictions of torn posters with parts of words or single letters of text remaining. The reference to the aesthetic of the French post-World War II artists known as "affichistes" (from French affiche meaning poster) is not only formal but conceptual, pointing to the larger context of that moment in the late 1950s and 1960s. The affichistes drew on Abstract expressionist aesthetics but grew out of the radical politics of reappropriation (detournement) and urban wanderings (dérive) of the Situationist International.
The painting depicts three male figures, topless, distributed throughout the picture plane. In the upper right of the canvas, a cat-like fox-colored figure that draws on a Disney-aesthetic makes an appearance, and gazes down at the carefree men.
The young men in Bisky’s work function as proxies for the fragile status of homoerotic aesthetics under totalitarian regimes, embodying their tension, vulnerability, and latent instability.
A recurring motif of Bisky's paintings are tromp l’oeil-like depictions of torn posters with parts of words or single letters of text remaining. The reference to the aesthetic of the French post-World War II artists known as "affichistes" (from French affiche meaning poster) is not only formal but conceptual, pointing to the larger context of that moment in the late 1950s and 1960s. The affichistes drew on Abstract expressionist aesthetics but grew out of the radical politics of reappropriation (detournement) and urban wanderings (dérive) of the Situationist International.