The beauty of male bodies, hedonism, bold colorsNorbert Bisky (b. Leipzig, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) is widely regarded as the most successful exponent of contemporary figurative painting in Germany. Now the artist has created a series of seventeen works on canvas and paper based on associations sparked by the oeuvre of the Expressionist Max Pechstein (1881-1955). The title Im Freien not only refers to the scenes they depict, which play out under the open sky; Biskywho grew up in East Germany, which is to say, in what he calls circumstances that were not freealso grapples with the question of what liberty means to us today and what we do with it. The preoccupation with freedom led both painters to a quest for a personal utopia. Pechstein found it in the South Seas, where he had visited Palau, then a German colony, in 1914; the archipelago seemed paradisiacal to him, an idyll far removed from political and social reality. Bisky, by contrast, focuses less on the exotic landscape than on its residents, whom he stages as individual members of a globalized society.



Norbert Bisky enrolled at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in 1994 to read German literature and art history but switched to the Berlin University of the Arts before years end; he studied painting with Georg Baselitz and entered Baselitzs master class in 1999. He was a visiting professor at the Haute école dart et de design, Geneva, in 2008-2010 and at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in 2016-2018.