The art of Tobias Pils is a mashup between abstraction and pictorial elements. His paintings and drawings, almost exclusively rendered in black, white, and grayscale, possess the energy of the comic strip and nod to late Philip Guston. Pils investigates primary themes: birth, death, becoming. He does not group his paintings into “series” but into “families,” underscoring the close relationship between his spindly lines and figures. “When I think of my paintings, I never think in black and white,” Pils has said, “and even forget that I paint only in shades of gray. . . . You may see it in black and white but you don’t experience it in black and white.” One of his home country’s most important museums now presents the large-scale survey “Shh.” —Elena Clavarino