Image: Capitain Petzel, Berlin
Capitain Petzel in Berlin has announced ‘Ancora’, Mikołaj Sobczak’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from 25 June to 1 August 2026. The presentation centers on three large-format paintings commissioned by the Salzburger Kunstverein and first shown in 2025 in ‘Moon, Sun, Mercury’ at the Salzburger Kunstverein, with support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland.
The exhibition title, ‘Ancora’, is explained by the gallery as Italian for “again” or “still”, a framing that matches Sobczak’s recurring interest in how historical narratives are continually reconfigured. In the exhibition text, the artist is described as interweaving historical events with elements of the present, moving across political figures, celebrities, pop-cultural references, technological developments and memes to trace the ways eras are linked and replayed.
Sobczak’s practice in ‘Ancora’ brings together historical allegory, queer identity and contemporary social critique in a densely layered visual language. The three paintings at the core of the show are titled ‘Moon (Propaganda)’, ‘Sun (Magical Realism)’ and ‘Mercury (Underground)’. According to the gallery, these works gather historical and contemporary queer activists, revolutionaries, writers, artists and scholars, placing them in proximity to antagonistic figures that include tech oligarchs and grotesque personifications of capitalism and fascism.
The gallery’s account of ‘Moon (Propaganda)’ notes that its left edge features a horseman inspired by Georg Grosz’s ‘The Pillars of Society’ (1926), with the swastika originally on the rider’s tie replaced by the X logo, formerly Twitter. The painting also includes figures such as Paracelsus, Dante Alighieri and the occult writer Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alongside a self-portrait of the artist and refugees at the center of the composition. ‘Sun (Magical Realism)’ combines references to injury and recovery, including Luigi Mangione as a superhero figure, curator and activist Tomek Pawłowski-Jarmołajew, Jeff Bezos depicted as a vampire and a self-portrait of Sobczak seated on a green Uber Eats delivery box.
In ‘Mercury (Underground)’, activists, writers and artists are gathered in an underground shaft. The gallery says the composition includes the lesbian author Eve Adams with her book ‘Lesbian Love’, Catherine Deneuve, a ghostly Martin Luther and the Polish queer activist Stanisław Chmielewski. The exhibition text links the figure of Mercury, guide of souls in antiquity, to salvation and renewal through art and civic engagement.
The show is accompanied by a group of collages that were referred to in Salzburg as “footnotes”. Produced on a smaller scale, these works extend the ideas, timelines and iconographies of the paintings while introducing a more intimate register. Made from materials found on the streets of Berlin, they bring together references to sport, science, war and entertainment, along with the Battle of Stalingrad, maps of German territories past and present, an article on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and motifs from the Rider-Waite tarot deck. The collages also include images associated with Orientalist desire and queer icons such as Vaginal Davis, James Dean and Marlon Brando.
Sobczak also created three small-format paintings specifically for the exhibition. The gallery says that during his residency at Villa Romana in Florence, he used slightly sandy pigments already in use during the Renaissance. The show further includes vases made in the Delft style at a historic porcelain manufactory in Poland, presented as references to craft traditions and to histories of migration, persecution and cultural exchange. Capitain Petzel says ‘Ancora’ will remain on view at Karl-Marx-Allee 45 in Berlin through 1 August 2026.
