Tilo Baumgartel

Tilo Baumgartel’s paintings have an air of fairytale about them. Suspended in space and time, his strange scenes unfold with wondrous uncertainty, suggesting fragmented dreamy narratives of his own invention. In The Fencing Lesson, Baumgartel composes his painting with surreal rigidity. His static figures, like statues, are frozen in the estranged aura of the room. Baumgartel uses his muted palette to extend the anomalistic quality of space; the planar walls and furniture seem transfixed, yet weightless in peculiar light. Picturing quirky innocence, Baumgartel’s painting is unsettling in both its inertia and expectant violence.In Burg, Tilo Baumgartel’s rough-hewn paint application conveys a romantic brutality. Half medieval village, half WW2 bunker, Baumgartel’s setting becomes an intrigue of abstracted construction: repetitive shapes, flat planes, and mottled brushwork churn in heightened suspense. In the bottom left corner, a masked figure creeps into the compound, oblivious to the network of comic pink explosives. Baumgartel creates tension through a double perspective: the illicit action viewed under the watchful gaze of a sleeping gargoyle is closely monitored by the viewers’ presence.