T̶h̶e̶ ̶L̶i̶e̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶r̶p̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ the lusophile
Austin Martin White @capitainpetzel, Berlin.
Spotlight Submission (Upcoming) September 4th, 2026
Austin Martin White @capitainpetzel Berlin. 10.09.26 – 17.10.26
Capitain Petzel is pleased to announce
The lie, the larp and the lusophile, Austin Martin White’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, spanning its entire exhibition space. Through paintings and works on paper, White investigates the construction of historical memory, exploring postcolonial histories and the ways images shape cultural narratives while addressing the unstable boundary between historical fact, national myth, and cultural identity.
At the core of the exhibition is the legacy of the Brazilian Baroque sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisboa (c. 1738–1814), known as Aleijadinho, whose biography has long oscillated between documented history and legend. White presents portraits of the artist alongside depictions of his prophet sculptures at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas. Other paintings draw on the woodcut covers of literatura de cordel, the popular printed booklets of Northeastern Brazil in which folklore, religion, politics, and history converge.
Working with polyethylene film, screen mesh, pigment, rubber, vinyl, and spray paint, White creates layered surfaces that reflect the fragmented, mediated nature of historical narratives, inviting viewers to consider how stories are constructed, circulated, and ultimately believed.
Austin Martin White (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Southampton Arts Center, New York (2025); the Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester (2025); and the Jewish Museum, New York (2024). The artist had his first solo exhibition at Capitain Petzel, Berlin, in 2022, followed by solo shows at Petzel, New York, in 2023 and 2025. His work is part of the permanent collection of The Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudsonv and has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Impulse, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, 032c, and The Observer, among others.
Images courtesy of the respective artists, photographers, and, where applicable, galleries. All rights remain with the copyright holders.
Photography: Matthew Dodd
Nymphenbrünnen
Adèle Vivet @Nonono, Paris.
Spotlight Submission AUGUST 25th, 2026
Adèle Vivet @Nonono, Paris. 22.05.26 - 28.05.26
Nymphenbrünnen: Curated By Mathilda Portoghese. Collaboration with DJ and composer LAZE.
Adèle Vivet draws inspiration from the ornamentation of Christian sacred architecture — capitals, tympanums, keystones, bas-reliefs — to create hybrid forms through ceramics and 3D printing. Nymphenbrünnen imagines a carnal encounter between her sculptures and the Gothic architecture of the Saint-Ouen abbey church in Rouen, a place deeply cherished from her childhood. The exhibition creates a singular space for formal dialogue between the seemingly pious monumentality of the building and the artist’s sensual, voracious mythology, which unfolds before us.
Through the extraction of various monstrous figures from architectural vocabulary — gargoyles, caryatids, sirens, Medusas, and others — Adèle Vivet proposes a reinterpretation through the lens of her own body, establishing an ambiguous relationship that is at once hyper-sensual and self-punitive. Within this personal storytelling, she surrounds herself with a clique of legendary wicked women whose desires are emancipated and unapologetic. Yet her inner monsters appear entirely exposed and far less assured, shaped by visceral concerns: the playfulness of their attitudes expresses a voracity that continually swells with the desire for transgression, followed by the mental flagellation and guilt that pleasure itself seems to generate here.
The Chimerea series, composed of five totemic sculptures, formally combines the technical concept of the caryatid with that of the bas-relief in order to stack micro-narratives upon one another. These hydro-chimeras function as confessional portraits, staging the nuanced facets and shadowy dimensions of a young woman trapped between desire and guilt, profound disappointments and ecstatic joys. Oscillating between the technological precision of 3D printing and the human tactility of ceramics, these Boschian nymphets seem to have boarded the Goa’uld spacecraft of an erotic-parodic spin-off, joyfully evoking the playful aesthetics of hentai pornography and erotic comics.
At the heart of this procession of fountain-women persists an obsession: that of the failing fleshly envelope caught in paradox — a body devoured by Judeo-Christian shame, constrained by social and moral injunctions, yet seized by an insatiable and polysemic appetite. Adèle Vivet’s work gives form to this intimate abyss: her sculptures beautifully exude ugliness, excess, and bodily fluids, through details evoking vomit, vaginal secretions, tears, saliva, and semen. Each figure appears both to revel in and suffer from its own materiality, while confessing — with universally addressed tenderness — the impulses, fractures, and desires that have long been suppressed or erased.
Text by: Mathilda Portoghese
Collaboration with DJ and composer LAZE: an immersive sound piece conceived by invited musician Laze amplifies this troubling and visceral atmosphere, enveloping the space in an organic sonic landscape and materializing the threshold between two eras that Adèle Vivet seeks to open.
Images courtesy of the respective artists, photographers, and, where applicable, galleries. All rights remain with the copyright holders.
Photography: lucia neri
Madness and Practice
Liz Dawson / Lucy Teasdale. @Axel Obiger, Berlin.
Spotlight Submission AUGUST 11th, 2026
Liz Dawson / Lucy Teasdale @AxelObiger, Berlin.17.01.2026 – 07.02.2026
With Madness and Practice,
painter Liz Dawson and sculptor Lucy Teasdale present new works that stage a quiet conflict between apparent intuition and rigorous construction. The title suggests a persistence that may register as futile or even obsessive, but is in fact an unflagging attentiveness to process, repetition, and control. Throughout the exhibition, surfaces and gestures promise immediacy while quietly betraying the labor and artifice beneath them. The works posit that this persistence is not a symptom of irrationality, but its inverse: practice – understood as sustained, almost ritualized work undertaken in pursuit of a particular kind of virtuosity. The works are indeed that – virtuosic. Liz Dawson’s paintings and drawings initially present themselves as enigmatic systems: arrows that double back on themselves, looping gestures, directional marks that feel both instructional and opaque. They resemble notations without a clear key – somewhere between a poet’s marginalia and a dancer’s shorthand for movement. There is an apparent urgency to the mark-making, a sense of speed or immediacy. And yet this urgency is deceptive. What seems like a quick, expressive stroke often reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be painstakingly built from countless minuscule painted marks. The spontaneity is staged; the immediacy is manufactured. Dawson’s paintings operate through layered artifice, withholding information in order to draw the viewer in, only to confront them with an insistent specificity. In Lucy Teasdale’s sculptures, vignettes of figures situated within constructed environments register as quickly made, caught mid-process, or held together precariously. Dripping, sagging, or splintered surfaces are rendered in playful, almost childlike colors, lending the works an initial lightness that suggests softness and reworkability.
On closer inspection, however, this assumption gives way: what reads as malleable clay is in fact cast resin. Gestures that imply immediacy – impressions, folds, a tactility of touch – are fixed, their apparent openness resolved into permanence. As with Dawson’s paintings, movement, action, or narrative is proposed without being fully delivered. What is implied is never quite embodied. Both artists work through a process of selecting something that resonates and committing to it fully. For Dawson, this might be a fragment of an image – often sourced from mass media – that begins to operate symbolically through repetition and directional marks. For Teasdale, it might be a photograph or a remembered scene: a pastoral image of a fisherman on a riverbank in England. These scenes carry with them the visual language of something given or authentic. Yet they are already mediated, already constructed – images shaped by history, projection, and expectation. What emerges across both practices is a shared interest in fiction: not fiction as narrative, but as fabrication. Nature, spontaneity, intuition, even madness appear here not as raw states, but as carefully constructed propositions. At a moment when distinctions between authenticity and simulation are increasingly unstable, these works demand an engagement that isn’t about immediate verification or resolution, but rather about the pleasure of recognizing fiction at work. Meaning is neither given nor guaranteed. The work asks to be met halfway. Practice, here, extends beyond the studio and into the act of looking itself.
Text: Ilyn Wong
Images courtesy of the respective artists, photographers, and, where applicable, galleries. All rights remain with the copyright holders.
Photography: Hans-Georg Gaul
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