After completing his secondary education, Peter Kapeller began an apprenticeship as a sanitary engineer, which he had to interrupt due to illness. It was in 1995 that he created his first large-format works and his first copper plates for printing. Kapeller's works are the result of a long, self-taught creative process.

Kapeller experiments extensively, "mistreating the material," as he puts it, and adapting it to his personal needs. His preferred tools are the brush, the ink pen, and small objects transformed into stamps. He most often works with mixed media, using India ink, colored ink, tempera, and ballpoint pen. He draws only at home, often at night.

Through drawing, Peter Kapeller exorcises his resentments, antipathies, and skepticism toward a world from which he feels excluded. He stages his obsessions and his ghosts. He says that when he draws, he gives himself the illusion of having an audience. His act of creation is a call to otherness, his way of inhabiting and re-enchanting the world.