Tilo Baumgärtel: Senza Parole

In the tradition of 19th- and 20th-century fantasists like Max Klinger, Arnold Böcklin, Edvard Munch and Giorgio de Chirico (with a dash of socialist realism for good measure), Leipzig-based painter Tilo Baumgärtel (born 1972) creates spaces and scenes suffused with chilly foreboding and menace. Looking at a Baumgärtel painting, the viewer gets the distinct impression of eavesdropping on a dimly remembered nightmare, or, as curator Christoph Tannert puts it, "looking at the visualization of someone's worst-case scenario." A member of the New Leipzig School generation of painters that also produced Neo Rauch, Matthias Weischer and Christoph Ruckhäberle, Baumgärtel makes figurative paintings that oscillate between the strange and the familiar, between dream and reality. Senza Parole means "without words" in Italian--a fitting subtitle for this new volume of Baumgärtel's paintings, set in post-catastrophic landscapes and populated by haunting figures.