Kenneth BergfeldAlbert Leo Peil

Opening: September 9, 5–7pm Kenneth Bergfeld & Albert Leo Peil Jan Kaps offsite at 535 West 22nd St, 3rd floor, New York, NY September 10 – September 26, 2025 Visiting hours: Mon–Fri, 10am–5pm (by appointment only) With special thanks to Schwartzman& Jan Kaps is pleased to present the largest exhibition to date in New York of works by Kenneth Bergfeld and Albert Leo Peil. Kenneth Bergfeld’s (born 1990, Germany) paintings operate at the intersection of posthumanism, systemic critique, and questions of identity. Drawing on visual traditions ranging from the Old Masters to contemporary digital aesthetics, his layered oil compositions feature avatar-like figures — faces obscured, hair rendered as both helmet and halo — suggesting a persistent tension between visibility and withdrawal. These ambiguous personae inhabit metaphysical, post-industrial landscapes where fiction and reality intermingle. Their partial concealment reflects poststructuralist understandings of the self as fluid, unfixed, and continually shaped by systems of power, language, and image. Bergfeld’s technically virtuosic compositions frequently collapse linearity: multiple timelines, symbolic registers, and cultural references coexist within a single canvas. This fragmentation of spatial and temporal continuity echoes the disorienting simultaneity of the digital age. By fusing sacred iconography, the illusionistic depth of Western painting, and the flatness of post-digital image culture, Bergfeld positions the pictorial surface not as a window onto reality, but as a site of ideological construction charged with ambiguity, critique, and encoded meaning. His work ultimately reflects the experience of life in what some theorists have termed a “permanent present” or “ongoing interregnum” — a liminal state between collapsing orders and the uncertain emergence of new ones. Albert Leo Peil (1946–2019, Germany) was a self-taught artist whose visionary practice remained largely unrecognized during his lifetime. Working outside the centers of the art world in the small Bavarian town of Lauf an der Pegnitz, he developed a deeply personal and idiosyncratic universe — engaging with discourses around gender, queerness, and identity well ahead of his time. Spanning drawing, embossed copper works, and costume design, Peil’s oeuvre explores desire and transformation through a private cosmology of mythical beings, cultural archetypes, and futuristic architectural Entwürfe. This exhibition marks the first presentation of his work in the United States. The meticulously detailed ink drawings on view — dating from 1979 to 1993 — are populated by androgynous, hermaphroditic figures situated in symbolically charged, tectonic landscapes. These stylized characters range from anonymous archetypes to cultural icons of the past and present, as well as entirely fictitious beings of Peil’s invention. Their identities and attributes are often revealed through poetic, elaborate titles inscribed in ornamental cursive on the front of each work, functioning not merely as captions but as integral components of the composition itself. Some works are accompanied on the verso by painstakingly manicured notations ranging from personal comments to excerpts of poems and streams of consciousness, representing a profound exploration of queer identities beyond the rigid gender norms of his time. Costume plays a central role in this exploration: not only as visual motif, but also as a critical device. Transcending temporal boundaries, Peil's characters appear in baroque robes, liturgical capes, knights’ armor, and sci-fi-inspired headgear, alongside elements drawn from high couture. Throughout, clothing serves as a site of identity construction and self-invention, collapsing distinctions between historical reference, fantasy, and personal mythology. Alluding to the tradition of camp and the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Peil also created elaborate faux-fur and velour garments that he reportedly wore in public — an exploration that dared to move beyond the imagined into lived reality, as he physically placed himself within the larger context of his work, casting himself as an active participant in a lifelong quest for becoming.