Peter Klasen was born in Lubeck Germany in 1935. From childhood he showed a talent for drawing and painting. He studies at the School of Fine Arts in Berlin from 1956-1959. He becomes friends with Bazelitz. He moves to Paris at the beginning of the 60's. Peter Klasen quickly becomes one of the most well-known artists of the New Figuration movement or Figuration Narrative with Adami, Erro, etc, of which he is the founder. A new figurative wave looking to put a sense of value in representation. Klasen thus elaborates into a personal plastic language; the artist explores and reinterprets signs of our urban environment and more generally, our society. He is passionate about images that are constantly put forward by the mass media, and denounces, by pictorial metaphors, the uniformity of the context of western life. His art is identifiable, colorful and easily legible by all. After a few difficult years, success comes to him in the 70's.
Peter Klasen offers images, paintings and graphic works, in order to provoke a reflection on the world that surrounds us, a critical reflection. Peter Klasen finds a balance between the sensual and the industrial, between what seems pleasant for him and what is repulsive to him, between darkness and light, between good and bad taste, putting the ambiguity of situations and thus humans, under the regard to everyone. His art, with its constant back and fortheness, is present between art and life. Klasen makes a point of processing the paradox and the hyper reality of objects that become the most basic form of life.
Klasen produces his works of paint on linen canvases, on iron, on sheet metal and on wood. He attains the interest of the public and his works are viewed on gallery walls of international museums and important galleries in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the United States, etc. Peter Klasen, master of contrast, lives and works in Paris.