by Chris Erik Thomas // Nov. 20, 2025
After dark, just off the grandiose boulevard of Karl-Marx-Allee, a cluster of glowing lanterns hover inside Capitain Petzel. They’ve been painted a deep wine red and decorated with a wormlike shape, covered in spikes, that circles around the delicate paper shell. Alongside the orbs are a series of paintings with a grainy, almost sandstone-like texture and two massive, translucent muslin veils that segment the space. Together, this arrangement of works form ‘Bolero Bordello,’ the gallery’s first solo show of Paris-based artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy.
The exhibition takes inspiration from both the 1928 orchestral work ‘Boléro’ by Maurice Ravel, and Russian art critic Sergei Diaghilev’s experimental dance company, Ballets Russes, which flourished in the early 20th century. The company broke conventions and engaged in radical experimentation, melding the influences of music, art and dance while brokering creative collaborations with the likes Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel.
The spirit of the troupe is translated into a fluidity that dances throughout the show, both in the delicate linework of faces and bodies present in the works and within the staging itself; the sheer fabric of the two massive murals allows for light and shapes to stack atop each, creating a feeling of walking through the layers of a deconstructed painting. The muslin surface of the murals depict scenes that Lutz-Kinoy has drawn from his own interviews with choreographers Isabel Lewis and Niall Jones, while atop the stairs, a lithe figure seems to part the curtains of a stage in the painting ‘Firebird’ (2025)—an ode to Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 ballet ‘The Firebird.’
With ‘Bolero Bordello,’ the theatricality of Lutz-Kinoy’s work comes alive, infusing the gallery space with a lyrical flow. In our conversation, the artist expands on the permeability of the show’s staging, the importance of light and color and transformation as a kind of freedom.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: ‘Bolero Bordello,’ 2025, installation view at Capitain Petzel, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, photo by GRAYSC
Chris Erik Thomas: The exhibition takes its title from Maurice Ravel’s ‘Boléro’ and the aftermath of Sergei Diaghilev’s “bordellic” world. What drew you to this musical and historical reference as a conceptual framework, and how did you translate those influences into your works?
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: I was drawn to ‘Boléro’ for its hypnotic repetition and gradual intensification, and for what it represents: disciplined chaos. It presents a tension between structure, affect and abandon. In Diaghilev’s world, with all its excess of creativity and all of the possibilities in the performers’ and choreographers’ experimentation, there was a depiction of an environment where art, music and performance collided in unpredictable ways.
I wanted to objectify that energy with a depiction of creation on a rhythmic cycle. In the exhibition, developed [specifically] for the space of Capitain Petzel, this unfolds through the segmentation of the long rectangular building. The space itself becomes a kind of externalized ‘Boléro’—an unfolding that’s rhythmic, sensual, playful, ecstatic.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: ‘Bolero Bordello,’ 2025, installation view at Capitain Petzel, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, photo by GRAYSC
CET: The two large, sheer murals both divide and layer the space. How did you develop this structure, and what did you want to reveal or obscure through this play of permeability?
MLK: I wanted to create an exhibition where the viewer is looking at the work and is conscious of how it could dissolve both the work and themselves into it. The layering blurs distinctions between surface and depth, between painting and environment. The material allows light to pass through, so the works shift as you move. That permeability interests me: how meaning changes depending on position, how visibility is always partial.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: ‘Bolero Bordello,’ 2025, installation view at Capitain Petzel, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, photo by GRAYSC
CET: How did you think about color and light in this show as emotional, atmospheric or narrative tools?
MLK: The materials themselves do a lot of the work. I’m interested in how color communicates mood and memory, and how we use these combinations to connect with style and meaning. Wittgenstein wrote about how color exists only in relation. The tones in this exhibition are about interdependence and how each hue shifts through light and proximity. The deep red of the lanterns—which is a variation on traditional colors typically present on painted Japanese paper lanterns—in contrast to the softer palette of the canvases, emphasizes an in-between. Light changes everything; it edits the show throughout the day. Visit the exhibition in the daytime, or at sunset; that’s the best moment.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: ‘Bolero Bordello,’ 2025, installation view at Capitain Petzel, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, photo by GRAYSC
CET: The curved lines and faintly sketched figures in the paintings evoke the fluidity of dance, yet the textured surfaces make them look as if they’re made of sandstone. Can you talk about your process for creating these works?
MLK: When making these works, my focus shifts between scale, color and iconography—one of those elements usually takes prominence at a given time. Seeing the works up close is very different from encountering them in reproduction, although I really hate to think of my own work like that—in fact, it grosses me out. There’s texture and a proximity to the surface—you sense a body, a shape and the sculptural—that matters.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: ‘Bolero Bordello,’ 2025, installation view at Capitain Petzel, Berlin // Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, photo by GRAYSC
CET: When ‘The Firebird’ premiered in 1910, it came to embody the power of art as a space for transformation amid political unrest. How does that spirit of experimentation and renewal resonate with your own approach, particularly in a time when artistic expression and freedom feel increasingly under pressure?
MLK: What drew me into these research lines were the early modernist performances shaped by powerful female figures—Nijinska, Rubinstein, Karsavina, Pavlova—who took charge of their creative identities in environments that were patriarchal or politically volatile. That sense of autonomy and self-determination continues to resonate.
‘The Firebird’ is, in that way, an allegory for survival through reinvention, for transformation as a kind of freedom. I tend to see art as a window more than a mirror; a space that opens onto possibility. This is why I am drawn to historical moments of creative collaboration; I continue to see my peers in these afterimages. ‘The Firebird’ and moments of collective creation expose the ways performative imagination can expand what’s visible. As José Esteban Muñoz once said: We have to “strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.”
Additional Info
Capitain Petzel
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: ‘Bolero Bordello’
Exhibition: Oct. 31-Dec 20, 2025
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, PRICE, Merlin Modulaw: ‘Bolero Bordello – Berlin Rhapsody’
Performance: Friday, Dec. 5; 7pm
capitainpetzel.de
Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin, click here for map
