Male Nude, Neukölln (c. 1980–1983) is a representative painting by Salomé (Wolfgang Cihlarz) from his early 1980s series of male nudes set in Neukölln, West Berlin. The specific painting is documented in exhibitions of the period and in the artist’s gallery records at Galerie Deschler, Berlin, where Salomé has been represented since 1989.
Close looking
The canvas presents a reclining or standing male nude in an interior space — a room in Neukölln, the West Berlin district where Salomé lived and worked. The palette carries what Salomé’s critics called the “pink note”: a deliberate tonal warmth — flesh pinks, salmon, and rose — that distinguishes his work from the darker, more bruised palettes of the core Neo-Expressionist generation. The brushwork is rapid and visible, the mark-making at once descriptive (the curve of a thigh, the knot of a shoulder) and declarative (the paint as paint, the stroke as stroke).
The composition is intimate rather than monumental: the figure fills the canvas without the heroic scale of a Baselitz or Kiefer. Where Baselitz’s heroes are solitary and burdened, Salomé’s nudes are relational — they exist in rooms, on beds, in bathrooms, in the company of implied others. The figure-ground relation is domestic: the body is not isolated against a void but embedded in wallpaper, tile, fabric — the material texture of working-class Berlin life.
What reads first is the unburdening: the body is not wounded, not heroic, not historical. It is simply present, available, seen. The gesture of the brush is tender rather than aggressive — a caress rather than an assault. This tenderness is the formal argument: the “pink note” as a refusal of the traumatized masculinity that dominates the Baselitz-Kiefer axis. The texture varies from thin, washy passages in the background to thicker impasto in the flesh, as if the paint itself becomes fleshier where the body is.
Critical reception
Salomé’s male nudes were exhibited in the 1980s alongside other Junge Wilden painters, but their reception was split. In the Berlin context — the Kreuzberg and Neukölln scenes — the work was read as a natural extension of the punk and gay subcultures that the gallery and the bands shared. In the broader German art market and in international exhibition contexts (such as Documenta 7, where Salomé appeared alongside Fetting and others), the work was often subsumed under the general “Wild” label, its specific erotics overlooked in favor of its formal alignment with Neo-Expressionist brushwork.
The “pink note” — the deliberate, explicit playing outside “the roles of men” — made Salomé’s work a unique instance within the movement: queer subject matter treated as a formal and thematic center rather than as decorative margin.
See also
- Salomé — the artist
- The Pink Note — the queer register in Junge Wilden painting
- Rainer Fetting — heterosexual counterpart (shower paintings)
- Junge Wilden — the movement