Marc Straus is delighted to announce The Seventh Skill, an exhibition of new paintings by Dresden artist Paul Pretzer. This will be the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in the US. The exhibition will take place in the gallery’s temporary space located at 132 Delancey St (entrance on Norfolk).

In The Seventh Skill Paul Pretzer has created a series of paintings inhabited by strange beings, animals, and creatures in a timeless pictorial setting. As with a single frame of a film, it seems that we have only a brief access to a narrative, and here this moment is charged with visual tension. Much like the German figurative painter Neo Rauch, Pretzer comes at these paintings without preconditions or preliminary drawings. They are unconsciously driven, often dreamlike, and surely outside of reality. What makes these German painters so essential to contemporary figuration today is the fluidity of composition and narrative. Pretzer’s craft is exquisite, a beautiful and painterly rendering with inherent abstractness. The struggle of the interplay between pure realism and abstraction was evident in the work of all the great European masters such as Rembrandt, Titian, and Vermeer.

Pretzer is of a young generation fully wired and accesses his material from mythology, folkloric history, and even cartoons, and films. They are all fodder and so titles such as The Sixth Sense, The Seven Dwarfs, The Seven Capital Sins, etc. He enjoys that an image may be one thing while reminding you of another.

Paul Pretzer, b. 1981 in Estonia lives and works in Dresden, Germany. He received his BA Fine Arts from Muthesius Kunsthochschule and MA Fine Arts from Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste, Dresden, Germany. Selected solo shows include: Musentumpel, Galerie Conrads, Dusseldorf (2011). Milch und Mortadella, Hamish Morrison Gallery, Berlin (2010). Kleine Taten, Grosse Gefuhle, Senatssaal der HfBK, Dresen (2009). Kings, Gods & Mortals, Hamish Morrison Gallery, Berlin (2009). After-Hour Time, DAC Gallery D’Arte Contemporary, Genova. Fummeln fur Forteschrittene, Hamish Morrison Gallery, Berlin (2008). Funky Playground, SZ Galleryim Haus der Presse, Dresden (2007). Im Buro, Hamish Morrison, Berlin (2007). Malereien, Kunstverein Linda, Hamburg (2005). Selected group shows include: National Museum of Art, Jakarta (2011). Wiedervereinigung, 1990-2010, Haus der Wirtschaft, Berlin (2010). Golden Agers & Silver Surfers, Kunthaus Baseland, Basel (2009). Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster (2008).