Among the most successful of the new generation of German painters his works often create a puzzle for the viewer. For as paintings they do not pursue the flatness and two dimensionality of high modernism, and neither do they show the at times acerbic neo-expressionism of his teacher Georg Baselitz.

Though the manner in which the white gesso-ed ground stands in for light reveals a clear awareness and knowledge of post-impressionist practices found at the beginnings of ‘the modern’. But, this said, Bisky is definitively a figurative painter and he makes no bones about it. The past is an open territory to be visited and appropriated at will.