Norbert Bisky Tropenmond, 2023

Executed in oil on canvas, Tropenmond is composed of painted canvas fragments arranged in a collage-style manner and mounted on a mirror. At the center of the composition, two male figures lie closely entwined. A wide-open eye floats above them, its illusionistic precision echoing theirs while remaining unanchored in the pictorial field. The fragments around them break into hard-edged planes and curved sections of cyan, yellow-green, orange-red, and white, animated by scattered triangular and teardrop shapes; between them, the mirror beneath shows through the gaps.

The exposed mirror draws the viewer's own reflection into the work, fragmenting it across the surface in the same logic that governs the painted figures. The title — German for "tropical moon" — carries associations of heat and sensuality that quietly contrast with the composition's formal dynamism. This collage-style, fragmentary quality connects the work to a longer history of the ruin as elegiac motif — a tradition in which incompleteness stands for the transience of life and civilization. Bisky holds figuration and abstraction in tension here, consistent with his broader approach to the individual body within a destabilized, ideologically unmoored space.