Description
Klasen Peter (1935)
German painter, photographer and sculptor, born in Lübeck in 1935. Encouraged to follow an artistic career by his grandfather, an art dealer, Klasen began to draw and paint as a child. In 1955, he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Berlin where he came in contact with the German avant-garde, attending courses directed by teachers like Trier, Grohmann, Richter, Schmidt-Rottluff. In 1959, he moved to Paris. In 1962, he was among the founders of the movement “Nouvelle Figuration” (also known as Narrative Figuration) together with Adami, Errò, Monory, Rancillac and Télémacque. His first solo exhibition took place in Paris, in 1966. Over the years, he refined his technique, reaching a very personal style. Peter Klasen uses the acrylic color through the airbrush, while, simultaneously, incorporates on the canvas objects, photos, documents, pieces of rope, symbolic languages, female nudes, numbers, work tools and industrial elements. His artistic imagination runs on the thin thread of contradiction, a balance between the sensual and the industrial, the pleasant and the disgusting. Klasen is a true master of contrast. In 1964, he participated to the exhibition “Mythologies Quotidiennes” along with 34 other artists of the Narrative Figuration. In 1968, he began the series of the “Tableaux binaries” in which objects were associated to bodies of men and women, while in 1974 he began a reflection on the Holocaust translating into large canvases representations of trucks, gates, chains.
