KLASEN Peter

Peter Klasen (1935–)

Title: The Solitude
Year: 1970
Medium: Color lithograph on paper
Paper dimensions: 50 × 70 cm
Edition: 42/99, signed by the artist

Please note, this work will be exhibited in the exhibition "Juste une illusion" organized by Frédéric Mette at the Espace Art et Liberté from September 25 to November 5, 2025 (3 place des Marseillais - free entry). If you wish to purchase this work, it will be available after the exhibition (for collection or shipping).

Description and Critical Analysis

In The Solitude, Peter Klasen stages a fragment of the industrial universe, transforming it into a symbol of modern isolation. The composition revolves around a mechanical detail: a grey metallic surface punctuated by utilitarian signs — a gauge, a leather handle, a frayed rope, and most strikingly, a red diamond warning of flammable materials. These elements function as coded signals, visual reminders of industry, regulation, and caution.

The cold steel, geometric rigor, and absence of any human figure create a mechanical solitude, a world where man is replaced by his instruments of control. The inscription “GX 67” reinforces the sense of enigma, almost militaristic, highlighting the impersonal and standardized nature of this aesthetic. Stripped of narrative, the image resonates as both hyper-real and metaphorical, turning banal details into markers of contemporary alienation.

Faithful to his visual vocabulary, Klasen appropriates the signs of industrial and technical environments to question the individual’s relationship to a world saturated with regulation and machinery. Here, solitude is not merely emotional but imposed by a modern environment governed by codes of safety, metallic surfaces, and instruments of surveillance.

Biographical Note

Peter Klasen, born in Lübeck in 1935, is one of the leading figures of the French Narrative Figuration movement of the 1960s. Trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin, he moved to Paris in 1959, where he developed his unique artistic vocabulary.

From the outset, Klasen drew inspiration from industry, advertising, and the graphic codes of consumer society. His works, often fragmented and saturated with visual signs, confront the sensual fragments of the human body with the coldness of mechanical objects, metallic surfaces, and warning symbols.

His art offers a sharp critique of modernity, portraying humanity as isolated within a world of technology and control. Exhibited internationally and present in major public and private collections, Klasen’s work remains a key contribution to postwar art.

By combining industrial realism with symbolic collage, Klasen captures the tensions of contemporary life: between desire and prohibition, intimacy and control, humanity and machinery.