BERLIN.- Esther Schipper is presenting Polympsest, Norbert Bisky’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view are all new paintings and two lamp sculptures.

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Norbert Bisky has established a formal vocabulary in which bodies become representations of existential states. The title, Polympsest, a neologism composed from the word palimpsest and the prefix poly, already signals two main tenets of the new body of work. It emphasizes the plurality of influences and the layered iconography, which is a contemporary urban equivalent of the ancient practice of overwriting manuscripts, to which the word palimpsest originally referred.

Bisky’s figures—painted in bright and seductive colors yet fragmented, falling, untethered—have always been a symbol of the precarious nature of man in totalitarian societies and under capitalism. The new paintings provide this intuited meaning with concrete narrative underpinnings: The young men have banded together in apparent conflict in some paintings or address the spectator directly; some appear to be shouting, others are masked, holding a Molotov cocktail in their hand, or gesture a gunshot. These paintings are of the here and now: they picture landmarks of Berlin life, some of which are threatened by gentrification or urban decay. They are a wakeup call by articulating a wider sociopolitical mood and the consequences of the state of polycrisis on psyche, society, or city—as exemplified by Berlin where the artist has lived since 1981.

The state of the city, and society at large, is represented by heady mix of quotations from urban life. The streets are alive in these paintings but also in a feverish dream of change, upheaval and decay. A recurring motif of these works 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. Comics, signs, and fragments of street art also feature in Bisky’s paintings, reiterating the hybridity of the urban environment, a living canvas of signs in constant flux.

Formally drawing on painting’s history and its contemporary discourse, Bisky’s works combine figurative and abstract elements. His figures are surrounded by painterly sections of thin translucent glazes applied in broad loose strokes. At times, they appear to delve into a sea of color or are partially obscured by sweeping patches. Some sections appear at first like raw canvas. A major theme of the current body work, then, is ruin. With their deliberate play on an unfinished and fragmentary quality, the paintings evoke its history as elegiac motif in 18th and especially 19th century painting and architecture where ruins functioned as symbolic representation of the fleetingness of life and, more broadly, of civilizations.

Championing plurality over purity, the formal incorporation of a wide array of art historical and everyday life influences is understood as a political gesture at a time when personal, sexual, cultural, and political freedoms taken for granted—in the West, in Germany and Berlin—are under threat. The bright and playful aesthetic has a combative quality, not just in its narrative allusions to unrest but with its insistence on a socio-politically coded color scheme, with its purple blurs and pink, orange and baby blue defiantly celebrating an exuberant camp aesthetic. The message is clear: We need to be alert to the changes in our environments and take seriously the messages scrawled on the walls, the election posters ripped to shreds, and the slogans that threaten communities.

With its assemblage of urban fragments such as electrical boxes, trash cans, illuminated letters, doorbell panels, and streetlamps, the lamp sculpture installed at the center of the exhibition space further emphasizes the references to street life. The work was produced in collaboration with Lars Murasch.