The Way You Make Me Feel

The gallery is pleased to present The Way You Make Me Feel, Paul Pretzer’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring a new body of work that further refines his sustained investigation into the mechanics of image-making. Since his first presentation with the gallery in 2011, staged in a temporary space on Delancey Street, Pretzer has developed a distinct pictorial language rooted in the friction between historical painting and the uncanny. Working within, and against, the tradition of European panel painting, Pretzer constructs meticulously staged compositions that operate with a heightened sense of control. His figures, objects, and environments are rendered with technical precision, yet what they perform remains curiously unstable. These are images that appear resolved, even composed, but quietly resist coherence. In this new body of work, Pretzer sharpens this tension through a more distilled visual language. The scenes are pared down, the gestures more deliberate, and the compositions increasingly direct. Rather than building complex narrative environments, he isolates moments, holding them in suspension, where meaning feels imminent but never fully arrives. There is a particular kind of figure that recurs across these paintings, pale, self-contained, inwardly luminous, and often marked by an almost incandescent red hair. This chromatic intensity operates less as description than as signal, situating the work within a lineage that extends back to the Pre-Raphaelites, for whom red hair functioned as an index of heightened emotion and symbolic charge. Here, however, the reference is neither illustrative nor nostalgic. These figures do not perform narrative so much as inhabit a state of suspension, where feeling appears slowed, contained, and only partially accessible. Based in Berlin, Paul Pretzer (b. 1981, Estonia) earned his MFA at HfBK Dresden under Ralf Kerbach. Known for a global exhibition history, he has held solo shows at Marc Straus (NY) and Oberüber Karger (Dresden), and participated in institutional group exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, Kunsthalle zu Kiel, and Städtische Galerie Dresden. His work is included in the Rubell Family Collection and Hudson Valley MOCA, following prestigious residencies at the Bemis Center (USA) and CCA Andratx (Spain).