Paul Pretzer: The Way You Make Me Feel
Marc Straus 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.
The recurrence of these protagonists accumulates into a kind of personal mythology. Historically associated with alterity, figures of seduction, mysticism, or marginality, red hair becomes, in Pretzer’s work, a condition of perception. The artist’s own life has been subtly shaped by encounters with such figures, moments that, while seemingly incidental, have altered trajectories in meaningful ways. These experiences are not depicted directly; rather, they are absorbed into the work as atmosphere, forming a visual language grounded in memory, proximity, and quiet transformation.
For his portraiture, Pretzer draws heavily on Early Renaissance and Netherlandish traditions, as well as 17th-century European portraiture such as English Royalty paintings. Elements of his sea, boat, and forest scenes directly echo the atmospheric work of Caspar David Friedrich and Romantic-era painters.
In the eponymous The Way You Make Me Feel (2026), a figure cradles an elephant’s trunk with a measured, almost ceremonial care. The gesture is careful, almost devotional, yet its meaning remains open. The image functions less as narrative than as proposition, an arrangement that invites interpretation while withholding resolution.
This calibrated dissonance extends across the exhibition. In Strawberry Pistachio (2026), an embrace unfolds with visible proximity yet subtle misalignment, as if the figures occupy slightly different emotional registers. In I’m Your Venus I’m Your Fire, at Your Desire (2026), a still life, milk, roses, a storm, collapses genres, merging romantic symbolism with theatrical excess. The scene feels both composed and on the verge of rupture. Across these works, emotion is suspended within the image.
Elsewhere, objects and gestures carry an understated charge. In Life Liquids (2026), a precise arrangement of glasses, citrus, and a utilitarian container reads as both familiar and estranged, its clarity undercut by an ambiguous internal logic. In Tender Center (2026), a figure splits open a fruit with quiet deliberation, the act rendered with almost clinical attention yet loaded with symbolic ambiguity.
The larger canvases extend this condition into landscape. Works such as Fine Anyway (2026) and I Spill a Drop of Gentle Milk, it Swirls Like Ribbons Made of Silk (2026) situate figures within expansive environments that feel less like settings than stages, spaces in which action is deferred and time appears suspended.
Pretzer’s practice is grounded in a deep engagement with the history of painting, yet this lineage is not quoted so much as activated structurally, through composition, surface, and the orchestration of visual elements. Within this framework, subtle distortions emerge: a shift in scale, an illogical gesture, an object that refuses to belong. These disruptions destabilize the image from within, producing a friction between mastery and absurdity.
What emerges is a body of work that foregrounds the constructed nature of feeling itself. Emotion is not expressed but staged, assembled through gesture, color, and relation. The viewer is not presented with a narrative to decode, but with an image that performs, inviting projection while maintaining its compositional authority.
The title, The Way You Make Me Feel, underscores this dynamic. It gestures toward emotion as relational and contingent, produced not only by what is seen, but by how it is encountered.
Over the course of his ongoing collaboration with the gallery, Pretzer has refined a visual language defined by precision, control, and compositional intelligence. What emerges is not a search for meaning, but a deliberate orchestration of it, images that assert their presence with clarity, even as they subtly resist being fixed.
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).
