Peter Klasen

Peter Klasen was born in Lübeck on 18 August 1935 and grew up in a family close to painting: an uncle who had studied with Otto Dix, a grandfather who collected. He was seven when he watched his home city bombed and destroyed, and his father, mobilised the following year, never returned. In 1955 he was admitted to the art school in Berlin, then the most advanced in Germany, where he studied in Hann Trier's studio alongside Georg Baselitz. He has lived and worked in France since 1959.

The move was a rejection. Visiting the second Documenta in Kassel, which confirmed abstraction as the international style, he concluded that everything had already been said in that language and said well. He went to Paris instead, where the flood of images — cinema, advertising, magazines — gave him a subject. By 1960 he was making tableaux-rencontres, paintings in which a cut photographic image and its airbrushed painted double were set against each other on the same canvas, and by 1962 he was a founding figure of Figuration Narrative, the European answer to Pop.

The mature work is painted with an airbrush at industrial finish: gauges, switches, hydraulic couplings, refrigerated wagons, steel shutters, padlocked doors, warning signs, all rendered at large scale and frontally, with no space behind them. From 1973 the dominant theme became enclosure — the barrier, the grille, the sealed container — and the human figure, which had appeared through the 1960s as a fragmented body drawn from advertising, largely vanishes behind them. A critic described the body as disappearing behind the heavy doors and covers of Klasen's trucks and prisons.

A visit to New York in 1981 changed the surface. Photographs he took there of graffiti, rust, stains and drips introduced time and decay into work that had until then been clinically clean, and produced Traces in 1982. He has been called the historian of walls and the archivist of inscriptions and stains — a description that places him, unexpectedly, in direct relation to the other artists in this collection. Neon, which he first used in 1971, recurs throughout, and the Berlin Wall cycle of a hundred paintings was completed just before the wall itself came down.

He has been the subject of retrospectives at the ARC of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1971, the Kunstamt Wedding in Berlin in 1986, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana in 2007, the Tri Postal in Lille in 2009, the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz in 2010, the Kunsthalle St. Annen in his native Lübeck in 2011 and the Couvent des Minimes in Perpignan in 2012. His work is held in more than ninety public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago.

SELECTED CV

Born 18 August 1935, Lübeck, Germany

Lives and works in Paris and the South of France

Education and Training

1955 Hochschule für bildende Künste (studio of Hann Trier), Berlin, Germany

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2022 Réflexions sur Malevitch, Galerie BOA, Paris, France

2019 Le cycle du mur de Berlin, Galerie BOA, Paris, France

2013 Œuvres choisies / White Spaces — Lost Landscapes, Galerie Anne-Marie et Roland Pallade, Lyon, France

2013 Peter Klasen, Galerie Laurent Strouk, Paris, France

2012 Peter Klasen, Galerie Laurent Strouk, Paris, France

2012 White Spaces — Lost Landscapes, Guy Pieters Gallery, Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium

2009 Frozen Light, Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX, USA

2008 Flash-back, Galleria San Carlo, Milan, Italy

2007 Werke 1966–2006, Galerie Raphael 12, Frankfurt, Germany

2006 Peter Klasen: la photographie et son double, Galerie Sonia Zannettacci, Geneva, Switzerland

2005 Nowhere Anywhere, Fine Art MB Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA

1998 Femmes de Lettres / Iron Ladies

1989 Histoire de lieux ordinaires, Louis Carré & Cie, Paris, France

1982 Traces, Galerie Adrien Maeght, Paris, France

1964 Peter Klasen / Gerhard Richter, Galerie Friedrich, Munich, Germany

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2021 Figurez-vous…, Palais des Arts et du Festival, Dinard, France

2019 Collection Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

2019 Peter Klasen, Musée de la Monnaie, Paris, France

2018 Peter Klasen, POSCO Museum, Seoul, South Korea

2017 Peter Klasen, La Maison Rouge, Paris, France

2016 Artistes à la Une, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France

2016 Peter Klasen, Fondation Stämpfli, Sitges, Spain

2015 Rétrospective (solo), Centre d'art l'Aspirateur, Narbonne, France

2013 Œuvres 1960–2013 (solo), Musée du Touquet-Paris-Plage, Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, France

2012 Rétrospective (solo), Couvent des Minimes, Perpignan, France

2012 Klasen, Schlosser, Segui, Musée Saint-Martin, Montélimar, France

2011 Rétrospective (solo), Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck, Germany

2010 Vorsicht Hochspannung — Retrospektive (solo), Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, Germany

2010 Peter Klasen, Musée de Sens, Palais Synodal, Sens, France

2009 Rétrospective — 50 ans (solo), Tri Postal, Lille, France

2008 Figuration Narrative, Paris 1960–1972, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, France

2008 L'Art entre en gare, Grand Palais, Paris, France

2008 The Hands of Art, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, and Marta Herford, Herford, Germany

Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs

2020 Art Paris, Galerie Patrice Trigano, Grand Palais, Paris, France

2019 Biennale de Paris, Pavillon de Bahreïn, Grand Palais, Paris, France

2017 Art Paris, Paris, France

2017 Art Up!, Lille, France

2016 Art Fair, Gwangju, South Korea

2015 Art Basel, Galerie ArtCube, Basel, Switzerland

Awards, Honours and Residencies

1959 Prix du Mécénat de l'industrie allemande, Germany

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2014 Monumental sculpture, P'Art Sino-Français, Guangzhou, China

2012 Monumental work acquired by the médiathèque, Vincennes, France

1998 Porsche GT2 Bâche-Klasen, French GT Championship, France

1997 Travaux Publics, installation, Le Cargo, Marseille, France

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Art Design Atomium Museum (ADAM), Brussels, Belgium

Assemblée Nationale, Paris, France

Behnhaus Museum, Lübeck, Germany

Berardo Collection of Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France

Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Paris, France

Centre d’art contemporain Gustave Fayet, Sérignan, France

Centre d’art international, Carros, France

Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Centre Georges Pompidou, Malaga, Spain

Collection Marzotto, Vincenza, Italy

Deutsche Bundessammlung, Bonn, Germany

Donation Lintas, Nîmes, France

EPIC Museum, Carthage, Tunisia

FDAC, Val-de-Marne, Créteil, France

Fondation Antonio Prates, Ponte de Sôr, Portugal

Selected Publications and Monographs

2007 Havana Gesture, Éditions Art in Progress

2005 Nowhere Anywhere: Photographies 1970–2005, text by Daniel Sibony, Éditions Cercle d'Art

1999 Klasen Virilio, text by Paul Virilio

1992 Peter Klasen, text by Alain Jouffroy, Éditions de la Différence