KLASEN Gravures

The meeting between Thierry Lacan and Peter Klasen brought the movment of Narrative Figuration in the Lacan collection. The German-born artist’s aquagravures reflect his interest in our society. Industrial themes, the image of the body, consumer objects, advertisements, etc., all critically reflect our social environment.
‘The real is nothing other than what I show you’ Peter Klasen
Galerie l’Estampe limited editions with Peter Klasen.
German painter, photographer and sculptor Peter Klasen was born in Lübeck in 1935. A master of contrasts, he was fascinated by the hostility of the modern city and by representations of the commodified body.
Peter Klasen grew up in a family sensitive to arts: his uncle Karl Christian, 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 a very 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 École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Berlin, then an avant-garde school, and became a friend of Georg Bazelitz. In 1959, having won the German Industrial Sponsorship 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 1960s, Peter Klasen was one of the founders of the artistic movement known as Nouvelle Figuration or Figuration Narrative. He developed a personal visual language, exploring and reinterpreting the signs of our urban environment and, more generally, of our society. He takes an interest in the images used by the mass media and, through his pictorial metaphors, denounces the standardisation of the Western way of life. His paintings and graphic works invite critical reflection on the world around us. Peter Klasen produced his first ‘tableaux-rencontres’, in which cut-out images contrasted with their airbrushed representation. 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 become a constant in his work. Klasen echoes a torn reality in which everyday consumer objects (telephones, electrical appliances, etc.) are mixed together,objects of seduction (lipstick), objects related to the body and illness (thermometer, stethoscope, syringe, pill…).
His work is deeply influenced by industrial themes. His paintings feature elements such as pressure gauges, sheet metal from public works equipment, metal locks, truck and railcar tarpaulins and hydraulic hoses. His paintings also feature logos, numbers and photos from magazines and posters.
In 1986-1990, Peter Klasen began the “Berlin Wall” cycle, a series of one hundred paintings that he completed before the fall of the wall in 1989. At the same time, he continued his exploration of urban iconography, revealing the hidden face of parking lots, attics, abandoned objects and garbage.
Internationally recognized, Peter Klasen’s work can be seen in dozens of museums and public collections. His works have been the subject of numerous monographs.
I was born in Lübeck, Germany, in 1935. My childhood would have been uneventful had it not been for the war, which my family suffered like so many others. Neither my father nor my uncle – returned from Russia, where they had been sent. My earliest memories are linked to these trag