Peter KLASEN (born 1935) - Lot 21

Peter KLASEN (born 1935) La Câblerie Française Original watercolor justified 27/40 61 x 61 cm German painter, photographer and sculptor Peter Klasen was born in Lübeck in 1935. A master of contrasts, he is fascinated by the hostility of the modern city and by representations of the commodified body. Peter Klasen grew up in a family sensitive to the arts: his uncle Karl Christian Klasen, a pupil of Otto Dix, was an Expressionist landscape and portrait painter, and his grandfather, a patron and collector, introduced him to the world of painters who were friends of the family. Peter Klasen began drawing and painting at an early age. He learned the techniques of lithography and airbrushing. Reading Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Thomas Mann had a profound effect on him. From 1956 to 1959, Peter Klasen studied at the Berlin School of Fine Arts, then an avant-garde school, and became a friend of Georg Bazelitz. In 1959, winner of the German Industrial Patronage Prize, he was awarded a scholarship and moved to Paris. There, Klasen became interested in the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague (Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, etc.). He reread the theoretical writings of Dada and the Bauhaus, and developed the concept of integrating photography into his pictorial work. In the 60s, Peter Klasen was one of the founders of the artistic movement known as Nouvelle Figuration or Figuration Narrative. He developed a personal plastic language, exploring and reinterpreting the signs of our urban environment and, more generally, of our society. He takes an interest in the images exploited by the mass media and, through his pictorial metaphors, denounces the standardization of the Western way of life. His paintings and graphic works invite critical reflection on the world around us. Peter Klasen creates his first "tableaux-rencontres", in which cut-out images are contrasted with airbrushed representations. This was also the moment when the fragmented image of the female body, taken from advertising posters, films and magazines, appeared on his canvases: it was to be a constant feature of his work until 1973. Klasen echoes a torn reality where everyday consumer objects (telephones, electrical appliances, etc.), objects of seduction (lipstick) and objects linked to the body and illness (thermometers, stethoscopes, syringes, pills, etc.) are mixed together. In the 1970s, Peter Klasen finally achieved success. He painted his "binary pictures", based on the opposing representation of a fragment of the human body and an object, painted or integrated, revealing his anguish at the split between the worlds of "being" and "having". In this way, he strikes a balance between the sensual, which he finds pleasurable, and the industrial, which he finds repugnant. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Peter Klasen began to reflect on the fragility of human existence and the violence inherent in our society. Internationally recognized, Peter Klasen's work can be seen in dozens of museums and public collections. His work has been the subject of numerous monographs.