Tilo Baumgartel’s paintings have an air of fairytale about them. Suspended in space and time, his strange scenes unfold with wondrous uncertainty, suggesting fragmented dreamy narratives of his own invention. In The Fencing Lesson, Baumgartel composes his painting with surreal rigidity. His static figures, like statues, are frozen in the estranged aura of the room. Baumgartel uses his muted palette to extend the anomalistic quality of space; the planar walls and furniture seem transfixed, yet weightless in peculiar light. Picturing quirky innocence, Baumgartel’s painting is unsettling in both its inertia and expectant violence.