Peter Kapeller

*1969, Austria

Peter Kapeller was born in Vienna and experienced a childhood of severe social neglect before finishing secondary school. After this he had a variety of jobs, including as a sanitary engineer.

His first period of time spent at a psychiatric clinic put an end to such forms of regular employment. Peter Kapeller experimented with artistic mediums early on in his life, without any training or support. In 1995 he moved into a small subsidised flat in Vienna. Since then he has worked with a steady goal of being recognised as an artist. He does not, however, want to be classified as an Art Brut artist. From 2021 to 2023 he lived in the House of Artists in Gugging. He lives in a shared appartment of a social institution in Lower Austria. Peter Kapeller works mostly with ink on paper, in a combination of brush, drawing pen, and his own homemade stamps. What is special about his artwork is the compactness which arises through varying levels of bold and subtle representation, always connected with certain themes. In 2010 he won the euward prize.

Caritas Vienna has supported him in his artistic work since the 1990s and since 2012 the ATELIER 10 of Caritas Vienna has been archiving and documenting his work. The christian berst art brut gallery in Paris represented Peter Kapeller from 2011 to 2017. He has taken part in numerous international exhibitions, including “25 Years Raw Vision” held in 2013 at the Halle St. Pierre in Paris, in Portugal at the Oliva Creative Factory, as part of exhibitions of the Treger-Saint Silvestre collection (2014, 2016). As part of the Treger and Saint Silvestre Collection, a work was presented at museum gugging in 2022.

Selected works