Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Bolero Bordello

Capitain Petzel is pleased to announce Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Bolero Bordello, opening on October 31, 2025.

 

Lutz-Kinoy treats exhibitions like immersive architectures, positioning painting as backdrop and sculpture as spatial intervention. Often conceived as total environments, his works respond to a venue’s architecture and site-specificity, entwining sensual, silhouetted bodies with recurring ornamental motifs, vegetation and floral arabesques, references to art historical movements, from Expressionism and Art Nouveau to Rococo flourishes. 

His paintings also carry the carnal vitality of 18th-century traditions, with dynamic bodily forms, gestural brushwork and ethereal layers, coupled with an ability to traverse a transhistorical landscape. These sensuous environments can feel like entry points to alternative spaces of communion, where the synergy of historical ornament and abundance lingers in compositions that suspend urgency, acting as parts of an escapist practice. Pleasure, color, intimacy and motion are foregrounded, as Lutz-Kinoy cultivates spaces where existential and emotional possibilities can unfold, allowing alternative forms of freedom to surface. Working across painting, ceramics and performance, the artist develops a plural and cross-referential practice that draws on diverse historical lineages.

Lutz-Kinoy’s is a practice grounded in performance, marked by a fluid sense of movement and collective collaboration. In projects such as Filling Station at The Kitchen in New York (2023), he re-staged a 1938 ballet as a live event that blended dance, music, and painting in real time. Similarly, his expansive ceramic productions, executed with skilled artists and artisans, transform making into a communal performance, where process and interaction are integral. For his exhibition at the gallery, he also welcomes the participation of his contemporaries, with written and performed contributions by the artists Isabel Lewis, Niall Jones and PRICE. 

A model of radical interdisciplinarity in the early 20th century, the Ballets Russes is a point of reference in the exhibition. Lutz-Kinoy re-imagines forms and symbols of a lineage where performance and visual spectacle merged. The works on view navigate towards the iconic and dramatic narratives of the historic company; flowers painted in human scale imagine Vaslav Nijinsky as an anthropomorphic thorned rose. And, as if lifted from the canvas, suspended paper lanterns painted with graphic floral iconography punctuate the gallery. Two painted vellums, each informed by the performance practices of Isabel Lewis and Niall Jones, reach floor to ceiling, segmenting the space into a metered rhythmic dramaturgy.

The Ballets Russes’ legacy resonates today partly because it emerged from a Russia on the brink of revolution, when artists sought freedom of expression beyond state confines. Among its brightest figures was Vaslav Nijinsky, whose radical choreography and magnetic performances embodied the troupe’s daring spirit. The company’s collaborations with composers like Igor Stravinsky, particularly the groundbreaking 1910 premiere of The Firebird, fused modernist music and dance into a new, electrifying form. In the current political climate, marked by censorship and geopolitical conflict, this history of cosmopolitan collaboration and artistic exile gains renewed urgency as a symbol of cultural openness and resistance to authoritarianism. Infused with a lyrical rhythm, Lutz-Kinoy’s use of historical ornament and material abundance interlace to form sensuous atmospheres that resonate with the Ballets Russes’ synthesis of dance, music, and visual art.

Bolero Bordello reflects Lutz-Kinoy’s interest in mirroring song structure within exhibition design. Taking inspiration from Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, originally choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava Nijinska, the composition engages with the legacy of the Ballets Russes and the aftermath of Sergei Diaghilev’s creative and bordellic universe. Through its cyclical rhythm, sensual repetition, and collaborative ethos, Boléro reimagines the decadent theatricality and cross-disciplinary experimentation that defined Diaghilev’s epoch. In Lutz-Kinoy’s hands, this legacy becomes a spatial choreography.

When we move through the world we are constantly adjusting our bodies in relationship to space. I began to understand this dynamic through dance, where the body is constantly vibrating against architecture and other bodies redefining itself. In my paintings I use this as a starting point to open a discussion on audience and scale.

 

– Matthew Lutz-Kinoy