PETRICK’S PURGATORY

20 Miniatures: AI-generated video, 12:00 min, 2026

Thanks to an introduction by Jan Sobottka, I was in conversation with Wolfgang Petrick about art and AI during the last two years before his death. I was struck by how naturally, at over eighty, he integrated AI into his work as a tool for developing ideas and visual drafts. We also discovered a great deal of common ground in our artistic influences and recurring themes.

My twenty-part series of AI-generated videos, PETRICK’S PURGATORY, is my personal homage to Wolfgang Petrick.

In PETRICK’S PURGATORY, Boris Eldagsen enters Wolfgang Petrick’s pictorial universe as an accomplice. Across twenty brief chapters, the film unfolds like a fever dream, moving through a world of beasts, nurses, cyborgs, infants, wolves, apes, carnivorous plants, fire, and flood.

The painter himself flickers through this unstable cosmos. Around him, his own visual world refuses to behave: bodies mutate, animals become both companions and threats, and humanity and nature bare their teeth. Care and violence, comedy and apocalypse, tenderness and grotesque excess all inhabit the same pictorial space. Between jungle and city, theatre stage and purgatory, there is no clear divide.

Eldagsen’s use of generative AI is crucial here. He animates the very logic of deformation. What would otherwise be dismissed as AI glitches (morphing bodies, impossible gestures, unstable continuity) becomes an extension of Petrick’s own visual language: a world of grotesque mutation in which civilization, flesh, animal instinct, and machines are apocalyptically entangled.

The black title cards give the video the rhythm of silent-film horror. Each miniature becomes a station on a journey through memory, fear, appetite, and transformation. In Backstage, Petrick’s creatures gather around the painter as though they were part of a theatre ensemble. With Eternity, the film refuses closure: the senses may fade, but the images keep working.

Premiere at the group show “DYSTOPIA – Wolfgang Petrick & Friends”, showcasing the work of Wolfgang Petrick, Tatjana Bergius, Boris Eldagsen, Ewa Finn, Samira Freitag, HELMA, Berit Myrebøe, Dennis Rudolph, Heike Ruschmeyer,Jan Sobottka, Iva Vacheva, René Wirths.

Schloss Sacrow, Krampnitzer Str. 33, 14469 Potsdam-Sacrow / Germany

Opening: Saturday, July 4th, 3 – 10pm.
Exhibition: 5.7. – 6.9.26, Fridays to Sundays noon – 6pm.  
Curatorial Walk with Michael Thoss: 19.7., 26.7., 9.8., 16.8., 23.8., 30.8. at 3pm.

The video will be available online from July 4th: