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.