Peter Klasen

Peter Klasen was born on 18 August 1935 in Lubeck, Germany, and attended the Katharineum secondary school there through 1955. He was then admitted to the Berlin art academy, studying painting from 1956 to 1958 under Hans Jaenisch before earning Meisterschuler, or master student, status under Hann Trier from 1958 to 1959. In 1959, on a scholarship from German industry, he moved to Paris, where he has lived and worked ever since.

In Paris, Klasen became associated with Nouvelle Figuration and, more specifically, with Figuration Narrative, the loose grouping of painters, including Erro and Valerio Adami, who used sharp, photographic and advertising-derived imagery to reassert storytelling and social content in painting. His signature paintings combine airbrushed industrial fittings, hydraulic gauges, warning signs, and sanitary and utilitarian hardware with fragments of the female body, a juxtaposition read consistently by critics as a commentary on the mechanization and commodification of everyday and bodily life. He held his first solo exhibition at the Friedrich Gallery in Munich in 1964 and has continued to exhibit and produce new work into the 2020s, including a 2025 to 2026 solo show at Galerie Sabine Bayasli in Paris. As of this profile's data date, he lives and works in Paris.

Gallery biographies and market-analysis sources, including Aucties, describe Klasen as a founder or central figure of Nouvelle Figuration and Figuration Narrative, crediting him with helping renew figurative painting in France against the dominance of abstraction in the 1960s. Gallery-published exhibition histories trace sustained attention over six decades, including a reported inclusion in the Fondation Maeght's L'art vivant survey in 1968, a solo exhibition at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1971, retrospectives in Berlin (1986) and Lubeck (2011), and a solo exhibition, "la metaphysique de l'urgence," at Galerie Sabine Bayasli in Paris from October to November 2025. The pre-2025 dates are drawn from gallery-published CVs rather than independently verified press coverage, so they should be treated as gallery-sourced rather than fully audited. No exact, sourceable critic quotations from major outlets were identified for this profile; the consistent framing across galleries and reference works instead centers on his role in reintroducing industrial and bodily imagery into narrative figurative painting.

Klasen's market is difficult to characterize with precision because published auction data for him is sparse and inconsistent across sources. Market trackers report a high of roughly EUR 86,000 tied to the painting Le bon magique, reportedly sold in 2014, though the auction house, exact date, and sale city are not confirmed in the sources available. A separate, lower result of EUR 15,300 is recorded at Dorotheum in Vienna around 2020, though the exact date could not be reliably matched to this specific lot in the source consulted. No single gallery holds exclusive representation; instead, a network of European dealers, including Galerie Sabine Bayasli, Galerie Saint-Martin, Galerie Poll, and Commenoz Gallery, handle his paintings, prints, and editions.

Klasen's market sits well below the scale of his museum standing: institutional recognition is broad, but public auction results are few and not consistently documented with full sale details. There is no published catalogue raisonne, and representation is spread across several galleries rather than concentrated with a single exclusive dealer, so collectors should expect to do more provenance work than they would for an artist with a centralized market. The gap between institutional depth and thin auction supply is the central fact to weigh before treating any single sale price as representative.