Mein Neues Deutschland

Why suffer unto thee, mein neues Deutschland


Destination Art, BBC’s television show on contemporary art visits Berlin and this week a glimpse of the East German painter Norbert Bisky is highlighted. Biskey describes his work as an expulsion of thought and of his childhood memories under Communist rule. He says that his work represents the false promise of paradise.

These paintings are the result of an unified Germany, and Biskey exaggerates his perception of the Aryan race. Although he denounces the stereotype image as a contradiction of the poly-culture which Berlin is today. Biskey's canvases show his fixation on castration, male rivalry and the seductiveness of materialism within the age of hip pop culture affecting the youth particularly, East Germans. These are idyllic compositions of semi-nude males portrayed in a psychedelic emptiness which spirals into a joyless contemplation, and Biskey paints them frothing at the mouth and at the very idea he says, of being too free and unsure of what to do with it. Yet they are lost in the consciousness of an unknown future.


Biskey’s work is intriguing because it deals with the subject of freedom and from a country that has been historically torn by fascism, socialist propaganda, guilt and unclear national identity. One of the pinnacle remarks is that his works are sort after by many German politicians as the subject surrounds an utopia and of the German Aryan painted in a loosely graphical fashion but also executed with a proficiency which represents a race where the undertones of the German psyche still is in its memory.

These are large paintings but the BBC kept meandering from detail to detail rather than giving a complete view of the work. Middle: Painted as if on ecstasy and ecstatic over the newness of a running shoe’s scent.