Tilo Baumgärtel

This contemporary painter is regarded as a representative of the so-called New Leipzig School. From 1991 to 1994, he attended the Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design in Leipzig. From 1994 to 1998, he attended the painting class taught by Arno Rink, under whom he was a master student from 1998 to 2000. Since 1999, he has lived in Leipzig as a freelance painter. Together with around 80 other artists, he has set up studio space on the site of the Leipzig Cotton Mill.

Baumgärtel is a member of the LIGA Berlin studio project. His works can be seen, amongst other places, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, the Saatchi Gallery and the Von der Heydt Museum.

Tilo Baumgärtel (born 1972) describes his working method as ‘representational, figurative and narrative’, a characterisation he consistently reinforces through the titles he chooses for his works.

The starting point for his visual works is a mental interplay with fragments drawn from the tension between his personal everyday life and the objective flood of images from the mass media. Amidst the various levels of reality in his works, the artist invites us to discover a world that is at once familiar and alien, full of forebodings and mysteries. Baumgärtel works with underlying tension and subtle dislocations. His concepts have their roots in Surrealism: this is particularly evident in the cool atmosphere and the strongly receding spatiality of his works. In the past, Max Ernst masterfully expressed the absurdity of his generation’s faith in technology by bringing together humans and technology, or humans and nature, without any discernible causal connection. Tilo Baumgärtel, too, occasionally makes direct reference to these role models. Drawings and sketches form an important part of the artist’s creative output. Distinct in form, format and subject matter, they offer an insight into the artist’s inner monologues and his reflections on everyday experiences and impressions. The superficial narrative traces that the artist leaves in his works always lead nowhere. They guide the viewer onto the uncertain terrain of associative and analytically fragmented narrative fragments.

“They are more like visual desires that I fulfil. Sometimes they move from a detail to the whole. The writer Julien Green once said that he had written an entire novel simply because he saw a very specific leather armchair standing in a very specific corner. That inspired him and was the starting point for an entire book. For me, sometimes a single visual element forms the core of an entire image that I develop from there. In that sense, the image isn’t planned, but builds itself ornamentally around something I have in my sketchbook.”

However, Baumgärtel is a sort of postmodern romantic who contrasts the sublime and the dramatic with elements of the mundane. Instead of a horseman with a billowing cloak, a young couple trudges through the stormy landscape, pushing a bicycle. The pictures not only begin with a detail, they also end with one. By bringing in this element of everyday life, Tilo Baumgärtel ultimately grounds the pictures after all, despite all the dampness.