Dorfstrasse

Born in Dresden in 1972, Tilo Baumgartel belongs to a group of young artists from East Germany known as the New Leipzig School, which is currently attracting much critical attention. Baumgartel's choice to study in former East Germany and then to continue living in Leipzig, reverses the old pre-Wall tendency of many artists to go to the West for freedom. Baumgartel was a teenager when the Wall came down and he came of age in a reunited Germany.

Based on distinct East German landscapes, Baumgartel's paintings have an unsettling air about them. Lingering between realism and surrealism, his art has a dream-like quality, in which the quirky stillness of his illusionary spaces is both claustrophobic and infinite, and where his often banal subject matter of everyday life is infused with a fairytale quality.

In Dorfstrasse Baumgartel composes the scene with a somewhat surreal rigidity. With a muted palette of greens and greys he has given this otherwise normal town scene the anomalistic quality of a space waiting for something to happen, where the strange stillness is filled with mystery. Onlooked only by the static birds on the telephone wire, this canvas is filled with a voyeuristic intensity in which the familiar is filled with a sense of the fantastic.