KLASEN Peter

Peter KLASEN (1935 – )

Title: Composition
Year: 1983
Medium: Original lithograph
Edition: Limited to 120 copies, signed and numbered in pencil (no. 67/120)
Sheet dimensions: 75 × 55 cm

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 this Composition from 1983, Peter Klasen asserts with striking visual force his artistic vocabulary built on industrial signs and graphic codes borrowed from the mechanical and safety world. The surface is organized into powerful planes: bold black and yellow diagonal stripes reminiscent of warning signage are juxtaposed with a rigid blue structure evoking metal panels, armored plating, or the protective shell of a closed universe.

The aesthetics of utilitarian objects are here elevated to an artistic language. Visible paint drips disrupt the order of the surface, suggesting tension between structure and accident, control and chaos. Circles, bolts, and mechanical fragments root the piece in a raw materiality, while the frontal, geometric composition underscores the clinical coldness of the industrial environment.

By appropriating these technical signs, Klasen goes beyond mere representation of industrial objects to create a symbolic system. Behind the metallic surfaces, behind the visual codes of danger and prohibition, the absence of the human figure becomes all the more striking—turning the work into a metaphor for modern society: surveilled, regulated, compartmentalized.

Biographical Note

Peter Klasen, born in 1935 in Lübeck, Germany, is a major figure of Narrative Figuration, an artistic movement that emerged in France in the 1960s. Trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin, he moved to Paris in 1959, where he developed his distinctive visual universe.

Shaped by the trauma of war and fascinated by the codes of industrial society, Klasen integrates into his works fragments of urban and mechanical reality: warning signs, dials, gauges, metal surfaces, locks, and bolts. His compositions, executed with near-photographic precision, are imbued with a critical edge—exploring the tension between human presence and mechanization, between desire and restriction, intimacy and social control.

From the 1960s onwards, Klasen took part in major international exhibitions and established his visual vocabulary as one of the most recognizable on the contemporary scene. His works can now be found in prominent public and private collections across Europe and the United States.

With this Composition from 1983, Klasen reaffirms the consistency of his approach: transforming the industrial world into a visual and critical poetics, where the rigor of signs becomes a mirror of modern obsessions and contradictions.