Tilo Baumgärtel’s figurative paintings are visual puzzles that deftly combine reality and imagination. They appear as snapshots that allude to larger, more dramatic themes. His dreamlike compositions are invitations to the spectator rather than narrative, providing a collection of visual themes for the viewer’s mind to explore.
The artwork of Tilo Baumgärtel has a fairytale quality to it. His unusual scenes, which are suspended in time and space, develop with magical ambiguity and imply fragmentary dreaming narratives of his own conception. Baumgärtel uses a stiff, nightmarish composition in The Fencing Lesson. His still forms, like statues, are immobilised in the alien atmosphere of the space. The planar walls and furnishings appear fixated yet weightless in the strange light that Baumgärtel creates with his subdued palette. Baumgärtel’s artwork, which depicts quirky innocence, is disconcerting due to its slowness and expected violence.