13 JUN until 12 JUL 2025

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Roman Ondak’s Out of the Blue, the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery. On view will be sculptures as well as photographic works with various interventions. 

The entanglement of past and present and of the personal and political have long been at the core of Roman Ondak’s practice. Loosely based on the color blue and its association with melancholy, the presentation includes works that evoke moments, memories and historical contiguities—and all in some way include shades of the color. The works’ poignancy draws attention to the idea that individual sights, experiences, and decisions are what shape a life, a country and history, that past and present are in a constant dialogue across time. But Ondak is not a gloomy artist, his works, blue or not, are full of reflection but also have much affection for life and his spectators. His vision of everyday life as moments from which history is made is a humanist one.

Crossword I, 2025, takes us into personal and political history. The first in a new series, it combines an archival image which Ondak reprinted and on which he then painted a crossword puzzle in light blue paint. The photo depicts a quarry. It is from the archives of a company in which the artist’s father once worked. The found crossword puzzle from the post-World War II era includes imagery of socialist propaganda. Crossword I becomes a historical palimpsest, interweaving the artist’s family’s and his home country’s life. Characteristic of Ondak’s general practice, the work has a slow burn: the enigmatic combination of the industrial site with a harmless pleasure of doing crossword puzzles invaded by propaganda affects us even before the multi-layered associations are unpacked. 

Maja in Blue, 2025, another biographical work, is based on a photo taken in 1998 of the artist’s wife. It depicts a woman in a bathtub, the scene bathed in luminous blue. Her head appears large—the bathtub was very small—and disembodied, the body hidden below the surface of the water. Tightly cropped, the blue environment around her keeps her contained, perhaps even imprisoned as the dark grid of the tiles suggests. The intensity of her upward-turned gaze transports us into the past, or, it is her gaze that travels to our present.

Memoirs, 2023, consists of a glass container with liters of dark blue liquid sealed inside. Identified as pen ink, the familiar color and material evoke both writing and the ephemeral quality of memory and lived experience. What are we looking at? The tools for an account of a life yet unwritten or the accumulation of what has been written, now dissolved again; that is, something that remains to be given shape and meaning, or its dissolution? 

His Eyes Peer into the Gloom II, 1994, and Sea in my Room, 1997, two early works, are more literally about perception and misrecognition. The former is a wall-mounted construction of a blue sheet of Plexiglas with perforations that form a triangular shape.

When seen from the front, the outline of a yellow area behind the transparent pane makes it appear as a light cone emanating from a lamp. Sea in my Room also plays with the associations everyday-life perceptions it can elicit: the picture of a dimpled glass surface is lit in such a way as to resemble a view of a shimmering expanse of water.

Melancholia, 2025, watching over this group of works, is a sculpture that resembles an abstracted seated figure, formed from a sphere and linear elements that read as torso and limbs. Conceptually, the new work is linked to the artist’s series of sculptures related to the first satellite Sputnik 1, assemblages from found materials that vaguely recalled the satellites circular shape and antennas. In another comment on past promises that have not been fulfilled, the satellite sent by man to explore space has turned into the image of a thoughtful, perhaps as the title suggests, melancholy human, similar to its namesake by Albrecht Dürer who sits and contemplates the nature of beauty and the course of history.

Roman Ondak was born 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava and Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. The artist lives and works in Bratislava.  

Roman Ondak represented Slovakia at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. In 2012, he participated in dOCUMENTA (13) and was named Artist of the Year by Deutsche Bank in Berlin. Ondak is recipient of the Lovis-Corinth Prize 2018. 

The artist has had numerous solo exhibitions, among them: Roman Ondak. Infinitum, Tapies Foundation, Barcelona (2023); Roman Ondak – Measuring the Universe, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022); SK Parking, Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021); #12 Roman Ondak, mezzaterra 11, Belluno (2018–19); Based on True Events, LovisCorinth-Preis, Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg (2018); Objects in the Mirror, BASE Progetti per l’arte Arte, Florence (2018); Man Walking Toward a Fata Morgana, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago (2017); History Repeats Itself, KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg (2017); The Source of Art is in the Life of a People, South London Gallery, London (2016); Storyboard, Times Museum, Guangzhou (2015); Roman Ondak, Kaldor Art Projects, Sydney (2014); Some Thing, The Common Guild, Glasgow (2013); Escena, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2013); Roman Ondak, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC, Paris (2012); do not walk outside this area, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2012); Within Reach of Hand or Eye, K21, Düsseldorf (2012); Time Capsule, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2011); Before Waiting Becomes Part of Your Life, Salzburg Kunstverein (2010); Shaking Horizon, Villa Arson, Nice (2010); and Measuring the Universe, DAAD Galerie, Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008–10).  

His work is held in multiple public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Zürich; Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.  

12 JUN until 13 JUL 2025

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Polympsest, Norbert Bisky’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. On view will be all new paintings and a lamp sculpture.

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 the 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.

Norbert Bisky was born 1970 in Leipzig, Germany. He studied painting at the Berlin University of the Arts in the class of Georg Baselitz; a year at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and joined the class of Jim Dine in the Salzburg Summer Academy. He lives and works in Berlin and Andalusia.

From 2008 to 2010, Bisky was a visiting professor at the Geneva Academy of Fine Arts HEAD and from 2016 to 2018 at the Braunschweig University of Art.  

Bisky’s vivid imagery has also featured in the context of performing arts. In 2013, he created the stage design for the Staatsballett Berlin’s performance of Masse, which took place in the Halle am Berghain. His work Vertigo has been permanently installed in the entrance area since May 2017. For the Stuttgart State Opera in cooperation with the Ludwigsburg Palace Festival, he directed and created the stage design for the play Die Schöne Müllerin in 2024. His series of works Colaba is part of the new collection presentation at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, This is Tomorrow.

The artist has had numerous international solo exhibitions, among them are: Walküren, Museum der Stadt Worms im Andreasstift, Worms (2024); Im Freien, Kunstverein Freunde Aktueller Kunst, Zwickau (2023); Mirror Society, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2022); DISINFOTAINMENT, G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig (2021); Berlin Sunday, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers (2020); Pompa, St. Matthäus-Kirche, Berlin (2019); Rant, Villa Schöningen, Potsdam (2019); Balagan, Bötzow, Berlin (2015); Zentrifuge, Kunsthalle Rostock, Rostock (2014); Special Report, Kunsthalle Memmingen (2013); A Retrospective of Ten Years of Painting, Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp, Cully (2011); Norbert Bisky: Paintings, Haifa Museum of Art (2009); Mandelkern, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund (2009); ich war’s nicht, Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2007).

Bisky’s work is represented in the following collections: Hall Art Foundation, USA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palm Springs Art Museum; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Le FNAC Fonds National d’Art Contemporain; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Oder); Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main; G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig; Kunsthalle Rostock; Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Schlossmuseum Murnau; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Staedel Museum, Frankfurt; Stiftung Kunstforum Berliner Volksbank; The MER Collection, Segovia.