Norbert Bisky City Gaze I, 2026

The series is characterized by its explicit engagement with Berlin as both a location and a subject. The compositions are filled with small details, such as suggested signs, street markings and map-like fragments of the S-Bahn and U-Bahn networks, street grids and district maps. Familiar station names ground the scenes in a specific urban geography. Young men are depicted hovering, leaping or plunging across these cartographic grounds, which function less as systems of navigation and more as emotional topographies experienced through the body. Among the figures, orange public rubbish bins covered in graffiti and stickers appear incongruously as still-life elements, setting the classical motif of the idealized male nude against the mundane fixtures of urban infrastructure.