Material Oil on canvas
Dimensions 130 × 90 cm
Price Price Upon Inquiry
Status Vetted

About the Work

While Tobias Pils has primarily focused on a palette of blacks, whites, and the range of grays that can be derived from them, his recent paintings are among the few in which he also incorporates other pigments.

The confrontation with color has always been a part of his work and has led to a conscious decision against its use. What initially seems to be a break from his past is, in fact, a natural continuation of his practice: a dynamic interplay between absence and presence. One inevitably calls for the other: Even what is missing remains present – but in a different way.

His compositions are filled with both abstract and representational elements, which often flow seamlessly from one painterly mark to the next. This creates a rhythm, as if the marks follow their own logic, accumulating meaning through a series of subtle, individual moments.

As such, Pils’s works are endlessly compelling as arrangements of textures, flows, and material invention – in a sense, they function as symphonic, non-objective compositions, even when their mythological content and primal imagery may tempt narrative readings.

This syncretic approach reflects a mind that revels in contradictions, even as it seeks to merge contrasting passages with a subtle and virtuosic array of mark-making strategies that are alternately bold, incisive, impressionistic, and completely open to the innate properties of paint, medium, and support.

Pils works at a variety of scales and in different contexts, responding to the urgency of his own intuition and the external constraints of architectural and institutional settings with equal fluency. In each of these forums, he locates the places where the vast and the intimate meet, both in the physical world and in the human psyche alike.

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