Tilo Baumgartel

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Tilo Baumgartel (born 1972 in Dresden) is a German painter. He currently lives and works in Leipzig.

Baumgartel attended the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst [1] in Leipzig from 1991-1994.

He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including “7 x Malerei” at Museum der Bildenden Künste [2] in Leipzig, “FUTURE/Five Artists From Germany” at Sandroni.Rey Gallery [3] in Los Angeles, “Painting Show” at Wilkinson Gallery [4] in London and “Life After Death” at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art [5]. He is represented by Wilkinson Gallery [6] in London, Christian Ehrentraut [7] in Berlin and Adam Biesk [8] in Los Angeles.

Tilo Baumgartel is part of a highly collectable group of young painters based in Leipzig, along with Matthias Weischer, Christoph Ruckhaberle and others. The common trait of the group is their production of large figurative oil paintings. Baumgartel’s practice like many of his contemporaries in Germany is concerned with the impact of history on the present and the creation of myth, history and fiction. Stylistically, Baumgartel’s paintings are reminiscent of social realist works and propaganda posters in their draughtsmanship and dramatic use of shadow, however this nod to the past is balanced by his oddly pitched narratives. Baumgartel’s fictions show people in positions of incongruous stillness, listless and stilted. His characters seem as puzzled as his viewers as to the nature of their activities, like actors on a set they seem to be performing their parts in order to communicate a slightly out of reach moral lesson. The peculiarness of Baumgartel’s compositions invoke a puzzled response that gives way to a low-level worry, spurred on by the unsettling presence of oversized birds. Baumgartel’s paintings offer a glimpse of the modern world that seems to be upset by its very nature; the weight of the past and the burden of the future make for an existence that is at once hurtling forwards and tripping up on its own baggage.