Peter Klasen was born in Lübeck in 1935. His childhood was steeped in art: his uncle, a pupil of Otto Dix, was an expressionist painter of landscapes and portraits and his grandfather was an important collector and patron of the arts.
In 1955, Peter Klasen begins an apprenticeship in lithography and airbrushing and joins the avant-garde University of Arts in Berlin. There he rubbed shoulders with many artists who were particularly marked by the spirit of the Bauhaus or German Expressionism, such as Hann Trier.
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In 1959 Klasen attended the opening of the Documenta in Kassel, which was devoted to abstraction. That same year he leaves Germany and moves to France. He rediscovers the theoretical writings of Dada and the Bauhaus. This re-reading is the trigger, he conceptualizes his art, and integrates photography into his compositions. Thus, from the beginning of the 1960s, Klasen’s canvases, painted with acrylic applied with an airbrush, are sprinkled with collages of objects, documents and photographs.
