To enter a room filled with George Tooker’s work is to expose oneself to the odd sensation of being neither here nor there, suspended in an uncomfortable half-life conjured up by the artist. For Mr. Tooker’s best-known works specialize in evoking the feeling that one’s most private thoughts are on display under the garish light of day, stopped in time for viewers to gawk at in a state of frozen animation. 
   “George Tooker: A Retrospective,” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through April 5, is the first museum retrospective of his work in three decades. The show exhibits many of his best-known pieces of social protest, such as the paranoid-inducing “Subway” (1950), mathematically engineered to capture a sense of being spied upon from every vantage point, and “Government Bureau” (1956), which explores the mass fears of the Cold War era. Simply put,  the works inspire feelings of great discomfort and distrust.
   Yet the PAFA show — a large-scale exhibit filling the spacious Fisher Brooks Gallery — also dedicates considerable wall space to exploring other forces of Mr. Tooker’s artistic life, such as his origins of study in Renaissance and late-medieval painting technique. Although Mr. Tooker didn’t convert to Catholicism until later in his life, nearly all of his paintings are lit with a luminescence most often associated with religiosity. This aspect of Mr. Tooker’s work often seems obscured by the strong themes for which he is best known, but the PAFA show, presented under glass, but without physical barriers to keep visitors a safe distance away, permits viewers to observe a striking devotional light that creeps into even the most startling of his works.   Mr. Tooker used the ancient technique of egg tempera painting throughout his career, painstakingly mixing his own color. Using this process limited his production to only a few paintings per year, but the technique gives his paintings a clear glow, even when they represent themes like despair, poverty or death.
   The exhibit, organized by Curator of Modern Art Robert Cozzolino, is roughly grouped chronologically, but occasionally deviates from its timeline to explore a compelling theme best observed through direct juxtaposition. Influences by Mr. Tooker’s most important contemporaries are also noted, with special attention paid to the dynamic forces of fellow artists Paul Cadmus and Jared French, friends, peers and occasionally lovers. Though the three men had a relationship that was often tumultuous, the artists greatly influenced each other’s work, and their importance in this respect is represented throughout the show.
   The most fascinating aspect of the exhibit, though, is in its successful capture of Mr. Tooker’s ability to represent dual existences. His paintings seem poised on the verge of two worlds at all times, whether teetering between life and death or between despair and happiness. At times, his figures seem stuck in a void between the two, such as in “The Waiting Room” (1959) or “Lunch” (1964), which freezes each figure in a private, inaccessible world, despite the many people who crowd closely nearby.
  Artistically, Mr. Tooker also inhabits a plane that is wedged between the two categories of modernism and representative narrative painting, which makes his work endlessly intriguing. Even when he evokes supernatural figures such as the Grim Reaper or other specters of death, he applies very classical techniques, using figures painted with painstaking clarity that defy the chaos of abstract art.
   So often categorized as a painter who purely worked in terms of social agitation, here, Mr. Tooker is bathed in a new light that both emanates from his paintings and from the sheer volume of works on display.

Lindsay Warner can be reached at calendar@thebulletin.us