In the glass-encased building that once displayed fine and applied arts from the Eastern Bloc, Capitain Petzel exhibits works by contemporary international artists from its parent galleries alongside its own programme.

Capitain Petzel Artists

Reflecting the retinues of Galerie Gisela Capitain and Petzel Gallery, as well as its unique flavour, Capitain Petzel’s roster includes established and mid-career international artists. This covers a wide selection of genres ranging from painting and drawing to conceptual and performance art.

Among the represented artists are Robert Longo, an important figure of the American Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s; Scottish artist Karla Black, known for her self-contained and site-specific abstract sculptures made with unconventional materials such as cellophane, lipstick, Vaseline, earth, and toothpaste; Israeli-born filmmaker and performance artist Yael Bartana; and German visual artist Peter Piller, who uses found images, photography, and drawings to unearth unexpected meanings in public everyday life.

They feature alongside artists who have more recently emerged on the international art scene, including Stefanie Heinze, a Berlin-based painter of playful, vivid, figurative works, and Russia-born painter, sculptor, animator, and curator Sanya Kantarovsky, whose work plays on physical and social tropes through his surreal depictions of contorted bodies.

Capitain Petzel Exhibitions and Art Fairs

Since its inception, Capitain Petzel has organised numerous solo exhibitions that were developed on-site in the gallery. Making the most of its capacity and architectural features, the gallery also intermittently holds large and small thematic group exhibitions. The Feverish Library (2013), for example, brought together the work of 28 artists to examine the theme of the book from a broad conceptual, psychological, and cultural standpoint. In Bringing Light into a Windowless Room (2014), the focus was narrower and showed only 3 artists’ works.