On the occasion of the Modern and Contemporary Art auction on June 3rd, 2021, PIASA presents two emblematic pieces by Peter Klasen, representative of his attraction to the ordinary of everyday objects.
After attending the Haute Ecole in Berlin in 1955, Peter Klasen moved to Paris in 1959. There he met Hervé Télémaque who introduced him to the art dealer Mathias Fels. In 1964, Peter Klasen took part in the exhibition "Mythologies quotidiennes" at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which marked the birth of Figuration Narrative, of which he is now one of the leading figures. He developed a cold and smooth vocabulary thanks to the airbrush technique, which enabled him to transcribe the photographic character of his approaches into paint.
In conflict with modernity, frightened by the deployment of technical gigantism, Peter Klasen denounced the excesses of consumer society by making everyday objects, whether utilitarian or mechanical, cohabit with fragments of the human body in his paintings: this was the period of the binary paintings. They were presented at the artist's first institutional exhibition, entitled "Ensembles and Accessories", held at the ARC (Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), curated by Suzanne Pagé and Pierre Gaudibert. Peter Klasen showed an installation on the theme of the body and sanitary facilities, with surgical utensils, bidets, pipes, certain objects enhanced with neon, and paintings representing bathtubs and toilets on a real scale. Our painting, Salle de bain (1972), which is stylistically very radical, is in line with these works: its subject is the representation of an ordinary object, in this case a tap, which occupies the entire canvas and stands out against a neutral background.
Peter Klasen (born in 1935)
Salle de bain, 1972
Estimate : 30 000 - 50 000 €
The object is painted with photographic, even surgical precision. Despite this objectivity, the whole is not devoid of ambivalence: a certain anguish emanates from the winding of the shower hose, which is reinforced by the clinical hardness and coldness of the painted metal object. Suzanne Pagé has well described the climate of strangeness emanating from these paintings of the early 1970s: "Living in Paris for more than ten years, he (Peter Klasen) was not, however, integrated into either the 'New Realists', the 'Objecteurs', or the 'New Figuration'. Rather, it is in the German figurative currents of the second post-war period that he should be situated, that of the "New Objectivity", of "Magic Realism", whose taste for cold and smooth mechanics, strongly sexualised and never innocent, under their apparent clinical rigour, he shares. Starting with the image broken up into multiple segments, poetic syncopations, his subject matter is now tightened around a single repeated object or two or three sign-objects clearly ordered in an impeccable and naked geometrical structure. "
Peter Klasen (né en 1935)
Manette camion fond clair, 1978
Estimate : 15 000 - 25 000 €
