KLASEN

Peter Klasen is a German painter, photographer and sculptor, born in Lübeck in 1935.
A master of contrasts, he is fascinated by the hostility of the modern city and by representations of the body as a commodity.

From 1956 to 1959, Peter Klasen studied at the School of Fine Arts in Berlin, then an avant-garde school. In 1959, winner of the German Industry Patronage Prize, he obtained a scholarship and settled in Paris.

Peter Klasen is, in the 60s, one of the founders of the artistic movement called New Figuration or Figuration Narrative. Then he developed a personal visual language: he explored and reinterpreted the signs of our urban environment and, more generally, of our society. He is interested in images exploited by the mass media and denounces, through his pictorial metaphors, the standardization of the Western living environment.

In the 1970s, Peter Klasen finally found success. He paints his “binary paintings”, based on the opposite representation of a fragment of a human body and an object, painted or integrated, revealing his anguish in the face of the split of the worlds of “being” and “having it”. “. He thus finds a balance between what is sensual, and seems pleasant to him, and what belongs to the industrial world, which he finds repugnant.